Excerpt from Go as a River by Shelley Read, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Not a damn thing," I replied to Wil's amusement. Not a damn thing, I repeated in my head, shocked at my rebellion in both language and deed. I would leave my brother sleeping in the dirt. I would ride in this stranger's arms. 

I trembled. Whether it was from pain or anger or love's first sparks, I don't know—perhaps all these—but my body shook as if Wil had plucked me from a frozen pond. My arms clung to his sinewy neck as he walked. His head bobbed slightly at the pull, as if nodding agreement. I felt light as a child in his arms, trusting as a child too. It was not like me to so readily accept aid and protection, to have such little suspicion of a strange boy's intentions. And yet, this girl in his arms was me. We traveled on the path I had walked my entire life in a way I never before knew, feeling everything around me subtly transformed. My father was perhaps waiting at the farm by now, and Uncle Og was most likely sitting in his wheelchair next to the window or on the front porch as he did most days—each a potential witness to this stranger carrying me through the field. But after years of fearing my father's judgment and Uncle Og's rage, I did not care what they might think or how they might react. In comparison to the immensity of Wil's arms around me, Daddy and Og and authority and decorum all shrank. Even the surrounding mountains, even consequence, seemed insignificantly small. 

I had left the farmhouse that morning an ordinary girl on an ordinary day. I could not yet identify what new map had unfolded within me, but I knew I was returning home uncommon. I felt as the explorers I had once studied in school must have when they glimpsed a far and mysterious shore from their seemingly eternal sea. Suddenly the Magellan of my own interior, I knew not what I had discovered. I lay my head on Wil's broad shoulder and wondered where and who he'd come from, and how long a drifter ever stayed in one place. 

Excerpted from Go as a River by Shelley Read. Copyright © 2023 by Shelley Read. Excerpted by permission of Spiegel & Grau. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.