Title:
The River WifeAuthor: Heather Rose
Year Published: 2009
Genre: Fantasy, Magic Realism, Romance
The
river wife is a woman by day and a fish by night. She has a duty to
tend the river. When she falls in love a man named Wilson James, the
balance of nature is upset and she must do what she can to save the
one she loves.
The
title, cover and blurb lured me in with promises of gentle magic. But
then I read the first sentence...
“As the sun crests the dark line of the land, I wake and step from the river, and that in itself is what is called magic.”
...and
had to put the book down. It was a bit too intense for me, though I
can see the same sentence inducing others to fall instantly in love.
Knowing
that I was prejudiced, I tried to keep an open mind and almost
succeeded in imagining myself charmed by the very lyric, very poetic
and very pretty writing. The book is full of passages like
“My father's face softened into the kindness of moss that grows in the furrows of trees and asks for nothing but dappled light and the touch of rain.”and
“He held me to him and his skin stole warmth from the closeness of our blood. The days of longing for him, the coldness of his skin, the taste of his tongue, the stretch of his legs, the colour of his eyes, the texture of his breath on my skin, the weight of him above me and in me and with me, so sharp and sweet was the relief of it, so deep and urgent and shuddering. And then he held me and said, 'I'm sorry. I'm sorry.'”.
Now,
a couple of phrases like that now and then I could have dealt with.
However, the entire book is written this way. Personally, I find this
sort of prose – when it's constantly like this – to be a bit too
much; it's the literary equivalent of drinking a bowl of honey. As I
read, I felt my mind closing, resisting the writing, and I hated myself
for it. I started noticing things like how the author likes to use
lists in descriptions and how sometimes verbs seemed to be missing
from sentences. I started mentally screaming “what does that even
mean?”
when I read about how the river wife wove the stories into the water
and listened to songs the river brought her – because that's as far
as it goes, there's nothing about why this is done or what it means
to weave stories. Furthermore, the words “stories” and “songs”
end up being used so often that they lose all meaning.
Despite
my dislike of the writing, on a macro scale it suited the story very
well. It's a love story at heart and the lyrical writing suits the
magical, otherworldly nature of the river wife herself. As you might
expect then, the love between the river wife and Wilson James doesn't
spring from things like compatible personalities and shared interests
– it's more of a mutual admiration of each other's exoticism and
being; they just are in love and that's just how it is. The start of the
book largely consists of the heroine's musings on her pre-Wilson
James life, the middle consists of her Wilson James life, and a
relatively action-packed Wilson James-related plot emerges in the
last fifth of the book. It's a short and simple story, couched in
poetry. However, I feel that the style gives it the illusion of
depth, rather than actual depth itself.
I
think most people will either love or hate this book. The writing is
so stylised that there isn't much room for a middle ground. It's a
lovely mood piece; Rose evokes the earthy, magical atmosphere very
well. In the end, however, it was simply not for me.
Alex's
Rating: 2.5/5
