Riversong: A Review
Author: Tess Hardwick Publisher: Booktrope Publishing Genre: Women’s Fiction My purchase price: $2.99 Riversong is the special kind of book that sucks you immediately into the world and life of its main character. Lee Tucker is a teenaged girl with an alcoholic mother and a long-lost father, just biding her time until she can start college in Seattle and be free of her mother and the people in her small town. She’s an artist, an outcast, and a severe worrier who writes down heartbreaking fears about what might happen as a way to cope. We meet Lee again about 15 years later. She is a successful businesswoman who long ago cast away her dreams of becoming an artist (such low pay!), and instead went into business with her husband. But her seemingly secure life is disrupted after her husband commits suicide, leaving her with a tanked business and some really bad guy after her. (This part of the book is kind of over-the-top and not really believable, but helps get Lee back to the place we need her.) That place is a small “one stoplight” town in the middle of nowhere Oregon. The town, like Lee, is not doing so well and struggling to find its way. In a book filled with interesting, realistic characters, Riversong’s strongest character is perhaps the town itself. Author Tess Hardwick paints the town with such a loving, fully colored brush. I feel like I know the ins and outs of the town, and as I write this, I actually feel a pang of homesickness for this place I’ve never been.
