River's Song

Title: RIVER’S SONG
Author: Melody Carlson
Publisher: Abingdon Press
August 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4267-1266-1
Genre: Inspirational/women’s fiction

Anna Gunderson is widowed, and she’s recently returned home following her mother’s funeral. She intended to close up her mom’s house, and return to her mother-in-law’s home where she lives with her nineteen year old daughter. But when she gets to the home of her childhood, she discovers she rather likes the primitive life her parents lived, without electricity, with the Siuslaw River as a road, and without the demands of her unkind mother-in-law, who treated Anna as nothing more than a slave.

With her mother-in-law threatening to disown her if she doesn’t return home, Anna decides to stay a bit longer, and meets an older woman, Hazel, who is studying the history of the Siuslaw Indians. Anna allows Hazel to stay in her grandmothers two-room cottage. And soon everything is changing…Anna, Anna’s life, and Anna’s future… Could Anna be entering a place of healing?

RIVER’S SONG is the first book in Ms. Carlson’s newest series, The Inn At Shining Waters set on the coast of Oregon. I enjoyed reading this woman’s fiction, getting to know Anna, her past, and her present, as well as some of the charming characters who surround her, sound as Babette, a wonderful French woman, Henry, the river boat delivery man, Hazel, the Indian researcher, and Clark—I’ll say no more about him.

RIVER’S SONG is a really good book, and is sure to appeal to those who love reading women’s fiction. Set in 1957, this is a story about a woman who went through the depression and the war, and now is struggling to find herself—reinventing her life. It’s a good read. $14.99. 286 pages.