When a moment changes everything, how do you live the rest of your life?
1940s Colorado: Teenage Victoria Nash is the only woman in a family of troubled men.
When she meets Wilson Moon, a young drifter with a mysterious past, on a street corner, their connection is immediate. And dangerous.
But then tragedy strikes, and Victoria is forced to leave her home and face a decision that will change her life forever.
Go as a River by Shelley Read flows exactly the way its title suggests—steady, immersive, and with a few emotional rapids waiting to knock the breath out of you when you least expect it. This is the kind of novel you read with a cozy drink, then suddenly realize you’ve been staring dreamily into space for ten minutes because a sentence hit you “right there.”
Victoria Nash, our quietly determined heroine, is the beating heart of the story. You follow her through love, loss, and the unpredictable currents of life in 1940s rural Colorado. She’s one of those characters who starts out soft-spoken and ends up carved into your memory like initials in a tree trunk.
Shelley Read’s writing is lush, poetic, and full of mountain air—sometimes so beautiful you wonder if you should underline whole pages and frame them. It’s a gentle book, but not a simple one; it sneaks up on you with its emotional weight, like a river that looks calm until you’re suddenly in deep water.
Why four stars? Because while the prose is stunning, it occasionally wanders off on scenic detours that make you want to lovingly call it back like a distracted golden retriever.
A solid four stars: tender, atmospheric, and beautifully written—perfect for readers who love bittersweet storytelling, resilient heroines, and prose that feels like stepping into a sunlit meadow after a storm.
An Amazon Editor's Pick Best Debut 2023 and Goodreads Choice Award Nominee, Shelley Read's internationally bestselling novel, Go As A River, is being translated into over thirty languages and has been optioned for film by Mazur Kaplan in partnership with Fifth Season. Shelley was a Senior Lecturer at Western Colorado University for nearly three decades where she was a founder of the Environment & Sustainability major and the PRIME program for at-risk students. She holds degrees in writing and literary studies from the University of Denver and Temple University's Graduate Program in Creative Writing and is a regular contributor to Crested Butte Magazine and Gunnison Valley Journal. Shelley is a fifth generation Coloradoan who lives with her family in the Elk Mountains of the Western Slope.
