2011 book 167

Bonnie Jo Campbell's Once Upon a River
OK, well, this book is definitely worthy of the critical acclaim it's been getting, but the first 2/3rds are not at all an easy read. It's grim stuff--very Winter's Bone, but with more rape. And I don't entirely get the Huck Finn comparisons (I feel like descriptions of the book are like "a girl runs away from some crazy badness and travels down the river to find the mother who left her a year ago" and while that is in some sense accurate, it's not really what this book is about. And frankly for the first chunk of the book my brain was screaming at the protagonist to stop being such an idiot and just falling into these insane situations, none of which have much to do with the river). Of course, I've never actually read Huck Finn, so maybe that is sort of a survivalist book with lots of animals being skinned.

That last paragraph reads really negatively and actually I loved this book, but it is really really hard to read at times. A/A-.