Once Upon a River

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.