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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Mar 2019, 272 pages
Paperback:
Mar 2020, 272 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Adrienne Pisch
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From the best-selling author of The Dog Stars, the story of two college students on a wilderness canoe trip - a gripping tale of a friendship tested by fire, white water, and violence.
Wynn and Jack have been best friends since freshman orientation, bonded by their shared love of mountains, books, and fishing. Wynn is a gentle giant, a Vermont kid never happier than when his feet are in the water. Jack is more rugged, raised on a ranch in Colorado where sleeping under the stars and cooking on a fire came as naturally to him as breathing. When they decide to canoe the Maskwa River in northern Canada, they anticipate long days of leisurely paddling and picking blueberries, and nights of stargazing and reading paperback Westerns. But a wildfire making its way across the forest adds unexpected urgency to the journey. When they hear a man and woman arguing on the fog-shrouded riverbank and decide to warn them about the fire, their search for the pair turns up nothing and no one. But: The next day a man appears on the river, paddling alone. Is this the man they heard? And, if he is, where is the woman?
From this charged beginning, master storyteller Peter Heller unspools a headlong, heart-pounding story of desperate wilderness survival.
Prologue
They had been smelling smoke for two days.
At first they thought it was another campfire and that surprised them because they had not heard the engine of a plane and they had been traveling the string of long lakes for days and had not seen sign of another person or even the distant movement of another canoe. The only tracks in the mud of the portages were wolf and moose, otter, bear.
The winds were west and north and they were moving north so if it was another party they were ahead of them. It perplexed them because they were smelling smoke not only in early morning and at night, but would catch themselves at odd hours lifting their noses like coyotes, nostrils flaring.
And then one evening they pulled up on a wooded island and they made camp and fried a meal of lake trout on a driftwood fire and watched the sun sink into the spruce on the far shore. Late August, a clear night becoming cold. There was no aurora borealis, just the dense sparks of the stars blown ...
The River offers both a literal and figurative journey; it is a thrilling and contemplative page-turner with sharp insight into the human condition. Heller's pace rushes the reader along, parallel to how Jack and Wynn are rushed down the river. The novel is excellent and comes to a moving, emotionally-charged conclusion...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Adrienne Pisch).
The River sets college students Jack and Wynn in a race against a forest fire as they canoe down the Maskwa River to the Hudson Bay with little chance of rescue. In recent years there has been an uptick in the number, severity and duration of forest fires, likely due to climate change (See Escalating Wildfires in the Western U.S.), so it is more important than ever to be aware of safety protocols.
Four out of five wildfires are started by humans, whether through tossing a cigarette out a car window, downed power lines, arson or not properly dousing a campfire. Natural ignition occurs most frequently because of lightning strikes. There are three elements a wildfire requires: heat, oxygen and fuel; this means that drought and warm weather ...
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