This River Awakens - Softcover

When 12-year-old Owen’s family moves from the city to the country in search of a new life, the boy forms a sometimes tentative friendship with three local boys: stalwart Roland, hapless Carl, and Lynk, who is “full of ascendant visions.” The boys’ lives will change when they discover a corpse in an area river and decide, for reasons that seem somewhat murky, to keep their discovery a secret. Secrets, in fact, play a very large role in this ambitious novel. In the meantime, readers meet three adults whose lives will intersect those of the boys: a mink farmer, an alcoholic parent, and a kindly caretaker. There is a great deal of material in this exceedingly long and sometimes dense and relentlessly dark novel, enough for two or even three books. This excess sometimes tests the reader’s patience, as does an overabundance of symbology—the river, the corpse, a nonfunctioning machine, a secret room, and more. Though not for every reader, the book will be redeemed for many by a cast of interesting characters and a degree of suspense about their respective fates. --Michael Cart