Once Upon a River

Narrator Susan Bennett's voice--intimate, pensive, and, at times, tentative--seems a perfect fit for the character of young Margo Crane. The quiet and somber Margo comes of age in Campbell's imaginative story of an awkward teenager who, after the violent death of her father, travels the Stark River in Michigan in search of her absent mother. Margo encounters an eclectic assortment of personalities that range from the rough and earthy to the eccentric and odd. Disappointingly, Campbell's rich characters demand more variety, texture, and individuality from Bennett's voice than she gives. They all sound much like Margo herself. But the author's strong writing will still carry the listener along the twists and turns of this memorable tale. S.K.G. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

March 14, 2011
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 Boneâstyle grit in it.