Go as a River — Shelley Read

In the spirit of Where the Crawdads Sing, a debut novel about young love set in the natural world of the Coloradan mountains.
When the ranch town of Iola, Colorado, was drowned in 1966 to create the Blue Mesa Reservoir, its inhabitants lost what had been their home for generations. In this poignant debut novel, Victoria Nash is a teenager growing up in the 1940s on Iola's only peach farm, the sole surviving female in a family of troubled men. Wilson Moon is a young drifter, displaced from his tribal land in the Four Corners region and unwilling to talk about his past or the intolerance he can't escape, but in Victoria he finds a kindred spirit. When Victoria finds herself pregnant and alone, she flees into the nearby mountains, where she feels both devastated by fear and grief yet bolstered by the kinship she discovers in the wilderness. What happens afterward is a quest to regain all that she has lost, even as the river rises to submerge her homeland. Go as a River is a story of loss but also of home, family, love, and resilience -- and of finding them where least expected. It is both a beautiful evocation of young love and a stunning exploration of our connection to nature.