Review by New York Times Review
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL'S first novel, "Q Road," published in 2002, told the story of Rachel Crane, an isolated and determined young woman who lives in meth country outside Kalamazoo, Mich., with her even more eccentric mother, Margo. After Margo shoots a local womanizer who has designs on the underage Rachel, she disappears, and Rachel, more out of practicality than love, marries the farmer who owns the property where she and her mother have always lived. "Q Road" was widely praised for its authentic rendering of rural Michigan: part dump, part wilderness and part farmland. "Once Upon a River," Campbell's second novel, leaves off where "Q Road" began - it is the story of Margo Crane, herself a difficult and willful young woman, who is 15 when the novel opens in the late 1970s. Margo's nickname in her family is "Sprite," and she has the cautious, defensive nature of a woodland animal - she rarely speaks, she always observes and her affections are remote ones. Even her father, with whom she lives in a little riverside house, can hardly get her to say anything, and so he treats her with a mixture of attention and bemusement. She is estranged, reluctantly, from the cousins across the river with whom she played as a child, and from her aunt, the source of all such homely comforts as cinnamon bread and Thanksgiving dinner. She is not quite sure why her mother has vanished, but does understand that she hated the hardscrabble conditions of life on the river and did not care for the relatives. As the novel opens, Margo's activities have become solitary - she is no longer going to school, she is an adept oarswoman, she enjoys watching her cousins' dogs and she is learning to shoot. Once Margo gets a rifle, her great passion becomes hunting. With single-minded dedication, she becomes so adept that she can kill a muskrat by shooting it in the eye (thereby leaving the hide undamaged), and she knows how to choose just the sort of ammunition that won't exit its skull on the other side. She practices every day, until she comes to understand how her body and the world form themselves around the perfect shot, and she soon has a sixth sense about where she is in relation to her guns at all times. She strongly identifies with Annie Oakley, and cannot understand how anyone could feel comfortable in a large building or a town, or even in a parking lot. The meticulous manner in which Campbell deploys the details of Margo's developing expertise as a sharpshooter is utterly convincing, one of the many pleasures of "Once Upon a River." Here she is, for instance, shooting an acorn off a horse apple: "She took a deep breath, relaxed her shoulders and slowed her heartbeat. She studied the railroad-tie fence post from its base to its top, as it rose to about her own height. She studied the green fruit with the burr acorn on top. Beyond it was the smooth expanse of river. She wrapped the sling around her left hand and elbow and pushed against it. When she nestled the stock in her shoulder and pressed her cheek against it, her stance and grip were solid. . . . She looked through her sights. Her instructor had talked about the 'wobble' in a person's hold, had said a person could never be absolutely solid, but for Margo there usually came an instant like now when she felt solidly rooted to the planet. Without a conscious decision to do so, she smoothly pushed the trigger straight back and held it there as the rifle sent the bullet down the barrel on its way to the acorn. She knew it was a good shot. She held steady even after she heard a sound like the final hard tap of a woodpecker's beak against an oak branch." Unfortunately for Margo, she is extremely beautiful, which means that she all too often attracts the gaze of men and boys - she herself is the white deer or the blond wolf, too striking to be left alone to follow her solitary path. There is room here for feminist grandstanding, but Campbell tends to be more of a naturalist than that; she lets the facts speak for themselves so the book's sexual aggression feels, almost, less like a crime than a mere twist of fate. * That doesn't mean Margo isn't vulnerable. She has been raped, just after her 15th birthday, by an uncle who lures her into a shed by promising to show her how to skin a deer. The attack, witnessed by her cousin, sets in motion the disintegration of the world she once knew. As "Once Upon a River" opens a year later, Margo accelerates this disintegration by shooting off the end of her uncle's penis (no more difficult, really, than shooting an acorn off a piece of fruit). Her act leads to the death of her father, leaving Margo alone to evade both her relatives and the government authorities who might take her into custody. As in "American Salvage," her celebrated story collection from 2009, Campbell has a ruthless and precise eye for the details of the physical world. The river is no paradise, with factories like the one founded by Margo's beloved grandfather and run by her uncle polluting both the water and the air. Margo, though, young, innocent and in danger, accepts that this fallen world is hers. She defends her right to make her own decisions, and even when they are bad decisions Campbell is clear they are the only ones she could make. Because she has nothing, Margo must rely upon the kindness of strangers (all of them male). The best of these is Michael, a generous liberal with a good dog and a sense of humor. Margo lives with him for a winter, comes to love him and almost marries him. But Michael is not cut out for survival in the war of all against all that is southern Michigan. As she learns eventually, neither is Margo cut out for conjugal love. CAMPBELL so intently scrutinizes Margo's inner life that she does not seem to be asserting any larger point about American culture or human nature - but she is. Margo's concerns are immediate: food, dogs, guns, moving her boat from one place to another, finding a place to take shelter. Abstracting meaning from her experience is difficult and almost painful, possibly because the first meaning she would have to abstract is that no one she knows is willing or able to care for her. In this, she could be Huck Finn, except that her world is much more dangerous and confined than his. Nor does she get to follow Annie Oakley's path, realizing her talents to the amazement of multitudes. She must, in fact, engender "Q Road" - that is, make the best life she can for Rachel, the daughter she is about to give birth to at the end of "Once Upon a River." Because Margo is so strong and idiosyncratic, because she possesses such great natural innocence, the reader would like her to transcend her circumstances, but the constant refrain of her life, as young as she is, is not transcendence but consequences. She is doomed to pay the price for her ignorance, pay the price for her enthusiasm, pay the price for her affections and pay the price for the sins of those who came before. The damaged world she lives in remains an ecosystem in which animals and humans, field and stream, purity and pollution, love and hate are tightly interconnected. It would be too bad if, because of Campbell's realistic style and ferocious attention to her setting, "Once Upon a River" were discounted as merely a fine example of American regionalism. It is, rather, an excellent American parable about the consequences of our favorite ideal, freedom. 'She smoothly pushed the trigger straight back and held it there as the rifle sent the bullet down the barrel.' Jane Smiley is the author of "Private Life," "A Good Horse," "The Man Who Invented the Computer" and many other books.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 24, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Margo Crane, 16, is called Sprite, River Nymph, a throwback, and a river princess. Beautiful, strong, and quiet, she is a hunter and a sharpshooter. Abandoned by her self-indulgent mother, she turns to her extended family across the Stark River in rural Michigan, but her uncle Cal is rapaciously lustful, and things turn violent. Margo steals Cal's fancy rifle, grabs her sacred text, a kid's book about her idol, Annie Oakley, and takes off in her grandfather's teak boat. And so begins 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. Margo first appeared in Campbell's debut book, Women and Other Animals (1999), and Campbell, a National Book Award finalist for American Salvage (2009), knows her protagonist so well that she 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. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: National Book Award and NBCC finalist Campbell is on a trajectory to best-seller status with this powerful novel.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This second novel by National Book Award finalist Campbell (American Salvage) is set in Murrayville, a rural Michigan town far removed from the modern world. Inhabitants have lived off the Stark River for generations, including 16-year-old Margo Crane's family. She's been taught the best fishing spots and knows the hidden dangers downstream from the Murray Metal Fabricating Plant. Her carefree existence ends when her mother, a depressed alcoholic, leaves town, and Margo is raped by her uncle Cal. Margo's unique revenge leads to her father's death, a tragic event that never-theless sets her free from being at the mercy of the Murrays. Equipped with ammunition, food, her father's ashes, and a pink envelope with her mother's return address, she takes her father's boat downstream, determined to find her mother. Margo survives by hunting, fishing, and garden pilfering and by distrusting people. Her river odyssey ultimately leads to self-preservation on her terms. VERDICT A truthful and deeply human story that pulls us in and won't let go. Readers looking for superior fiction are in for an uplifting, first-rate story. [See Prepub Alert, 1/10/11.]-Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by School Library Journal Review
Sixteen-year-old runaway Margo Green creates a new life on the river. Guided by a biography of Annie Oakley and an astounding ease with the natural world, Margo struggles to navigate the perils of human nature while she searches for the mother who abandoned her long ago. (July) (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
