Once Upon a River

Tributaries are about to join this story. We might, in the quiet hour before dawn, leave this river and this long night and trace the tributaries back, to see not their beginnings--mysterious, unknowable things--but, more simply, what they were doing yesterday.

On a midwinter night, a stranger bursts into the Swan, an inn at Radcot along the Thames, with a dead girl in his arms. She is unquestionably lifeless, but later she takes a breath and returns to life. Our story seems to begin here with the mystery of the drowned girl who came back from death, but in fact we will as much need to travel upstream closer to the source of several stories, rather than downstream to the end of the mystery, before we get to the bottom of this enigma.

This book was written masterfully. The wistful late-Victorian world (I'm guessing) is brought to life on the page, and it inspires your imagination with a particularly muted and earthy colour palette. The fantasy here isn't particularly in your face, it's really just the barest touch, but it's enough to infuse the entire story with a certain charm of the unknown - are certain things merely just superstition repeated by rural farmers who don't know better and which can be explained away with science, or is there really some kind of magic at work here? I'm usually a pretty impatient reader and skim a lot, but this book made me slow down a little and eat up as much of the details and words as I could.



The mystery itself was gripping enough for this to be a binge read for me. It wasn't exactly a thriller, but the core of the story was refreshingly different, centering around a strange little girl who apparently came back from the dead, and who seems to belong to everyone but no one at the same time.

The character work was beautiful too - we are introduced to some of the vilest characters that you will wish to personally drown in the Thames, and also some of the sweetest ones (Robert Armstrong was hands down the best character in this entire novel, closely followed by his pig Maud - I would've cried and thrown this book at the wall if anything had happened to them). You witness how downright disgusting people can be to each other (the way Victor Nash treated Lily White really riled me up) but you also see how much kindness and sweetness some humans are capable of (Robert Armstrong's parents were just... so good. They didn't end up together, and as a result he led a pretty fractured and ostracised childhood and life, but they both did as much as they could by him, and the story went on a much happier trajectory than it could have otherwise gone; same with the way he loved and did his best by Bess).

Overall, a surprisingly beautiful read that promises mystery, romance, and emotions of every colour.

The village feeling of this is very strong. The mystery of what happened to several little girls is written well and the mysteries are revealed at a good pace. I am impressed the various solutions to these mysteries.
The best part of the book is the way we grow to care about all the people in this town. They feel like individuals with happiness and tragedies who are trying to support each other.
If you want to read about a cozy village supporting each other through tragedies, you will like this book.

“There are stories that may be told aloud, and stories that must be told in whispers, and there are stories that are never told at all.”

An inn, a mysterious girl, three separate family stories, and the Thames all combine to create a story that I'm really glad I finally read! The story revolves around the girl – who is she? Where did she come from? How did she get here? And the answers lead the reader down some really twisty family stories that sometimes lead to more questions before they get to the answers.

I thought this was a really fine example of magical realism; the fantastic elements were blended really well with real life to the point where you're left wondering if–maybe–there's some truth to it all after all. The cast of characters is large, but not so large that you lose track of who's who, and the answers at the end were surprising to me.

One of my favorites from this year. Highly recommend.

Once Upon a River pulls together some of my favorite things about fiction, and I loved it.

Pros: An evocative premise. I feel like the best books start with a question, either implicit or explicit. Setterfield has a great one: what's the story of this drowned girl who came back to life?

I love good storytelling and stories about stories, and Setterfield is great at both. Her placement of a storytelling tavern at the center of the plot is brilliant, allowing her to stew in the questions and thought processes of the audience vicariously as The Swan's residents attempt to piece together their observations and conjectures. She absolutely nails the sense of place and nostalgia for small close-knit communities, and the bar setting reminds me of the best in that sub-sub-category of “bar-based small town camaraderie, like the bar scene in Stephen King's Wizard and Glass and the frame story in Name of the Wind.

Speaking of place, she's an expert at reinforcing ties to the local geography. Coming from rural America and having a strong connection to a certain patch of nature and its ecosystem, I love this emphasis for a book set in the 1800s. Rural America may be stuck in the past, but this example is one for the better, and I resonated strongly with her characters' rootedness in their place. She also continually references the river in a way that makes it feel like its own character in the story, akin to how Hogwarts feels like an active participant in the plot of Harry Potter. She uses current- and flood-based metaphors throughout, almost always without feeling tacky, which has the effect of binding together the whole story. For “river-based fiction,” I love it on par with Phillip Pullman's Book of Dust prequel to the Golden Compass and the underwater city scene in Ponyo.

Mechanically, Setterfield has written a mystery, but she's managed to reveal information to the audience in natural ways, so that we can follow clues without being spoon-fed the big reveal. Even mysteries I really like (like JK Rowling's Cormoran Strike series) can fall into the “villain gives monologue for no reason besides reader comprehension” trope, and I salute her for pulling off the plotwork to avoid that problem.

Her prose also has an enchanting richness to it, similar to Erin Morgenstern's Night Circus, that completely won me over. And I have a soft spot in my heart for books that absolutely nail the last few pages, or “dismount.” The Road, for instance, or Stand By Me. I thought she certainly stuck the landing.

Cons:

I will say, it was slow in the middle. The entire back of the book cover is the premise, so after the first hundred pages I was in the fascinating place of having no idea where the story would develop. And the last 150 or so kept me steadily churning through on curiosity and suspense. But for all the gushing praise I had above, it took me over a month to finish. I did have a busy month, and I think she wrapped all the strands together in the end, but the story loses momentum a bit in the middle. The premise, execution, and climax are all great, but I don't think it needed to be 450 pages long. We perhaps could have done with a few less chapters about each of the ensemble protagonists.

One winter solstice night, an old Inn on the Thames is visited by a badly wounded stranger holding the lifeless body of a young girl. Hours later, the girl miraculously revives. Who is she? Is there an explanation? What follows is a story of a community of people who lives intertwine around the mysterious girl as they all try to puzzle it out and make sense of it. This is a slow-moving story (though I did not mind the pace) with many mysteries and a great cast of characters that you'll care about. I enjoyed not only the rich atmosphere of the story, but also the way the mysteries slowly unfolded until finally at the end very much is revealed. Doesn't really compare to anything else I've read recently. But I liked it.

This author lured me away from the opening pages into her imagined world where dead girls come alive, where evil men are punished, and where, gathered around a crackling fireplace in an English inn with tankards of ale, pleasant company, and hospitable hosts, great tales are told. Reminiscent of both Chaucer and Dickens, Once Upon a River is a sweeping epic of a fairy tale, with richly painted characters – from an abused farmgirl who longs to run away to a wealthy couple grieving the kidnapping of their child to an intelligent, caring father trying to make contact with his wayward son. Add in a nurse who's on the scene when the drowned child is brought to the inn alongside an itinerant photographer, a world in the 1870's which is awakening to the writings of Charles Darwin and the dawning of psychiatry, and not only a prescient fortune-teller but a wise pig, and you've got yourself enough wonder, mystery, emotion, and intrigue to propel you through the 460 pages of this epic, lyrical, and ultimately uplifting novel. Highly recommended and unlike anything else you will read this year.

This was a slow burn – taking its sweet time, just like the river Thames, which is kind of its own character in this magical, cozy, and a bit Jane Eyre-esque story. By the end, I was so pleased that I had read it, and think it will stick with me for a while. It had a compelling mystery, a bit of a love story, lots of family drama and dynamics, a love for storytelling within the story, and strong women (& a couple of men). It was a nice summer read, but with the chilly weather, rain, floods, and general darkness (outside and in some characters) in the story, it might have made for a good winter break read by the fire. I would like to find more by this author now.