Hello and greetings to all of you watching PBS Kansas.

Tonight I am bringing you a book recently recommended to me by daughter in law, Sarah up in Leawood.

Go as a River by Shelley Read.

The book was copyrighted in 2023, but I was not previously aware of it.

It is now time to go inside the cover.

Shelley Read is a fifth generation Coloradan who lives with her family in the El Mountains of the Western Slope.

She was a senior lecture at Western Colorado University in Gunnison, Colorado for nearly three decades, where she taught writing, literature and environmental studies.

Go as a River is her first novel, and as noted, I consider it to be a very worthwhile read.

The book is inspired by true events surrounding the destruction of the tow of Iola, Colorado, in the 1960s, as taken from Miss Reads website.

‘This book explore what it means to lead your life as if it were a river gathering and flowing, finding a way forwar even when the river is dammed.

Victoria Nash is a young woman of 17 who runs the household on her family's peach farm in the small ranching town of Iola.

As described by Reed, ‘Iola had the Iola Hotel for fancy folks and the tavern tacke on the back for drinking folks.

Jernegens Standard Station Hardware and Post, the cafe that always smelled of coffee and bacon, and Chapman's Big Little Store with groceries and a deli counte and too much gossip.

Victoria is the sole surviving female in a family of troubled men.

Her father, who has spent his life tending the family peach orchard.

Her uncle Ogden who is confined to a wheelchair as a result of losing one leg in the war and whose other leg had no foot or use after gangrene, and her younger brother Seth, an angry young man suffering from the loss of his mothe and brother in a car accident.

When Victoria meet another young man, Wilson Moon, on the streets of Iola, her life is changed forever.

Go as a River is a book about families, about love, about hardships and survival, about racial hatred and bias and their destructive influence on people and people's lives.

It's a book about sacrific and determination, about nature, and it's a book about peaches and peach husbandry.

I thought Read's storyline was interesting and well thought out.

Her characters were believable and smoothly integrated into her story which runs from 1948-49 to 1971 and which certainly creates some surprises along the way.

And I was really captivated by Read's writing.

Note the following samples.

From her Prologue, ‘Imagine a town silent, forgotten, decomposing at the bottom of a lake that was once a river.

If this makes you wonder whether the joys and pains of a place wash away as the floodwaters rise and swallow, I can tell you they do not.

The landscapes of our youth create us, and we carry them with us.

Storied by all they gave and stole.

And who we become.

‘Above our farm, the ari earth was patchwork, with pale green sagebrush, red scrub oak and raggedy pinions.

Scattered clumps of yellow aspen trees quaked like little celebrations acros the otherwise solemn hillside.

A few ponderosa pines rose above the rest and spread their wide, dark skirts.

The sun beat down on it all, as if uninformed that summer had ended.

As you can see, Read captures the natural beauty of her home state.

Tonight's book has bee Go as a River by Shelley Read.

I recommend it highly.

And thanks again, Sarah.

That's our show.

I look forward to our next visit here on PBS Kansas.