How are you supposed to discover your ideal job? The standard method is to fill out lots of questionnaires about your strengths and weaknesses, take...
Continue »
AmyM, January 1, 2012 (view all comments by AmyM)
Margo Crane is one of the most mesmerizing and memorable heroines in years, a free spirit who is nonetheless acutely aware of the realities of being a young woman trying to live life on her terms. Campbell's lyrical prose captures the rhythms of the Stark River for which the novel is named and carries readers to the story's satisfying conclusion.
GINA BETCHER, January 1, 2012 (view all comments by GINA BETCHER)
The untalkative Margo Crane makes her way along the world of the Stark River (the Kalamazoo River) to avoid and avenge and discover. If you overlook Margo you overlook a journey upon a river. Even once, you've lost your chance.
Product details
348 pages
W. W. Norton & Company -
English9780393079890
Reviews:
"Staff Pick"
by Kathy H,
Margo's travels on Michigan rivers don't cover that much territory in miles. In learning and experience, they cover a lifetime. Nature gives her food to hunt. People mostly give her a hard time. The river gives her a home.
by Kathy H
"Publishers Weekly Review"
by Publishers Weekly,
"In her follow-up to National Book Award finalist American Salvage, Campbell trains her unflinching eye on Margo Crane, a down-on-her-luck 16-year-old living in late 1970s rural Michigan who is, in rapid succession, abandoned by her mother, raped by her uncle, and witness to the shooting death of her father. An accomplished marksman who worships Annie Oakley, Margo takes off, traveling up the Stark River and struggling to survive on her own, having been once again rejected by her mother. Encountering a progression of strangers, both kind and otherwise, Margo is a modern-day pioneer whose steely resolve is matched only by her guarded need for tenderness. Forced to kill a man in a moment of panic, Margo must learn to forgive those who have hurt her in order to forge a new and better life for herself. Working against the backdrop of a beautiful but unforgiving landscape, Campbell juxtaposes spare prose with lush details in this stark chronicle of hardship and splendor, friendship and disappointment, and families undone and reunited, and though the novel occasionally flags under the crushing burden of Margo's unremitting ill fortune, it is, finally, a fine and sobering story with more than a little Winter's Bone-style grit in it. (July)" Publishers Weekly Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
"Review"
by Jaimy Gordon, National Book Award winner,
"American fiction waited a long time for Bonnie Jo Campbell to come along. A lot of us, not only women, were looking for a fictional heroine who would be deeply good, brave as a wolverine, never a cry baby, as able as Sacajawea, with a strong and unapologetic sexuality. We wanted to feel her roots in some ancient story, we wanted Diana the huntress, but not her virginity; we wanted a real human girl who we could believe had been suckled by bears, or wolves. To give us heroines like this, the god finally brought us Bonnie Jo Campbell, one of our most important and necessary writers, and Margo Crane, the central character of Once Upon A River, an outcast, feral beauty who can shoot like Annie Oakley, is her most poignant and mythic creation so far.
"Review"
by Booklist (starred review),
"A dramatic and rhapsodic American odyssey. A female Huckleberry Finn. A wild-child-to-caring-woman story as intricately meshed with the natural life of the river as a myth....[S]he conveys all that Margo does, thinks, and feels with transfixing sensuous precision, from the jolt of a gun to the muscle burn of rowing a boat against the current to the weight of a man. From killing and skinning game to falling in with outlaws and finding refuge with kind if irascible strangers, Margo's earthy education and the profound complexities of her timeless dilemmas are exquisitely rendered and mesmerizingly suspenseful. A glorious novel destined to entrance and provoke."
Powell's City of Books is an independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon, that fills a whole city block with more than a million new, used, and out of print books. Shop those shelves — plus literally millions more books, DVDs, and eBooks — here at Powells.com.
