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.