Product Description

Donna Milner's After River is a novel not just for reading but for living in, spellbinding in its impeccable plotting, achingly human characters and note-perfect prose. This is also a work that beautifully renders time and place, as an isolated and harsh Canadian geography is wracked by a seismic shift in the moral and social landscape of the late 60s.

Before the wise and gentle River came, 15-year-old Natalie Ward believed her world was perfect: her family would always be together, living and working on their small dairy farm carved out in a mountain valley deep in the Cascades of British Columbia. Natalie would always be "my girl" to Boyer, her gifted older brother, and the pride of Nettie, her beautiful, charismatic mother. After River, things were changed, which Nattie blamed on the encroaching world: the new highway that would connect the town to the Trans-Canada, the closeness of an America engulfed in Vietnam and violence. But it was River, the young American draft dodger who became Ward's hired hand, who changed everything one summer.

Thirty-five years later, the family is still shattered in ways that no one could ever have foretold. And now, as her mother lies dying, Natalie must return to the home she has spent most of her life running from, as the family's dark secrets and betrayals threaten to scar a new generation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #167138 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-31
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In this debut from Canadian Milner, a nostalgia as "rich and sweet as... freshly churned butter" belies the lingering bitterness of family tragedy. Natalie Ward is a thrice-married writer forced by the imminent death of her mother to return to the town she left in shame at the age of 16. She recounts her golden childhood growing up on a busy farm "carved out of a narrow mountain valley deep in the Cascade Mountains." But when a handsome Vietnam War resister named River Jordon ambles up the family's dirt road in 1966 and offers his services as a farm hand, this innocent simplicity begins to curdle. The Ward family quickly falls in love with River, each finding some essential need filled by his gentle personality, but these bonds drag the family deep into tragedy. The frequent evocation of long-past shocking events is used to drive this story, but when those events are finally revealed they seem slightly artificial, and the author relies on clichéd notions of "the healing balm of letting go" to imply that in the end, though "life is messy... it all comes out in the wash." Despite these oversimplifications, this novel's solidly crafted settings and characters, blended with optimism, make it a charming if sometimes over-sugary read. (Apr.)
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Customer Reviews

Amazing first novel
This is one of the best books I have read in a long time. It is astonishing that Donna Milner is a first time author - the book reads like she is a seasoned writer. It gripped me from the first page, and I couldn't wait to get back to it, although I was really sorry to get to the end. Milner created characters of great depth that you really felt you got to know and care about. The book gave you a terrific snapshot of small town life in the 60's, which was quite idyllic for this family until things came tumbling down. Milner handles issues like draft dodging, rape and homosexuality with ease through her wonderful prose.
I am going to be waiting anxiously for the next book from this fine author!

"Where the past cannot be altered; it can only be lived with. Or buried."
Natalie Ward, the heroine of Donna Milner's exquisitely written debut novel must finally confront the ghosts of her past. She's a happily married middle-aged mother and a natural journalist who also has a capacity for engendering great empathy and kindness, but she also has secrets - mostly of the family variety, and mostly sublimated. It is these secrets, and also a sudden phone call from her daughter Jenny telling her that her mother Nettie is dying, that thrusts Natalie back into the past where she forced to relive events - both gorgeous and catastrophic - as she comes of age on her family's dairy farm in British Columbia.

It is the turbulent mid-sixties and the impressionable sixteen-year-old Natalie is living a secluded and insular life with her parents Gus and Nettie, and her three brothers, Morgan and Carl, and Natalie's favourite, the brilliant and bookish older brother, Boyer. Indeed the Wards live in their own world in the long, hot summer of 1966 where all is drenched in the golden glow of the summer sun on their farm near the town of Atwood just miles from the US/Canadian border.

A mercurial and imaginative girl, with a virtuous sense of conscience, Natalie seems to relish in her alienation. At school she does nothing to encourage friendships, content to spend most of her spare time with Boyer, playing his word games in his room up in the attic and reading his books. Things change when a young American draft-dodger by the name of River Jordan is employed by Natalie as a handyman and flows into the lives of the Ward family with his large green duffel bag, his guitar case over his shoulder, his hair the sun-streaked colour of a hayfield drying in the sun.

At first, for Natalie, River comes across as a hippie, perhaps representative of all of the oddly dressed young Americans marching beneath peace signs, protesting the Vietnam War while also sticking flowers into the gun barrels of riot police. But soon enough Natalie is falling under his spell, his eyes entrancing her, "like the colour of a blue-green ocean," an ocean she had only seen in her imagination. The rest of the Wards accept River's reasons for coming to Canada, his gentle and beguiling nature at first seemingly a perfect fit for this close-knit family, especially Boyer whose analytical mind craves knowledge and ultimately understands how River is exorcising his democratic right to choose.

Only Gus, a blue collar working man who wears his long johns like a second skin, winter and summer, belies an instinctual mistrust of the young man, considering him to be one of the spoiled greasy haired hooligans who stand under a peace banner because they don't have the guts to fight for their country. None of the Wards however, can predict the eventual heartache that will follow River's arrival, a heartache that sweeps "like a cold wind" through the valley, shattering this family and becoming an irrevocable tragedy of errors accomplished in the course of a few long ago summer days. Indeed the Wards, and Natalie in particular spend the rest of their lives coming to terms with the events of that year, River's presence eroding the jagged edges of their resistance, his ghost echoing throughout their world for decades to come.

When Natalie travels towards Atwood on the bus thirty-five years later, "like a time machine carrying her in slow motion back to her past," she must ask for forgiveness from her mother Nettie and her brother Boyer and see beyond the faded edges of memory. Natalie longs to unburden herself, to confess her part the downfall of her family and to say out loud how it all came about, and where it could have been changed.

It's hard to fathom which themes are more profound in this novel: the bigotry and intolerance that gradually isolate the Ward family in a town where there is little respect for tolerating anything that is different different, or a young girl that is so blinded with what she believes is love that she gradually loses sight of reality with devasting consequences; in the end, she's a child lost in the moment, believing that her desire has made her an adult. Ultimately a novel about the past and what has been left behind, Donna Milner captures the beautiful natural rhythms of day-to-day workings of dairy farm life and the ways that personal jealousies can balloon into ruthless and bitter vendettas.

Throughout, Milner's graceful prose is deliberately propulsive but plain, and her talent lies in her careful plotting as Natalie moves through her solitary world, bound to her mother Nettie and her brother Boyer by a shared secret. She's unable to let go of her unamed resentment that she carries with her out the door the day she left the family fold.

Obviously River's arrival became catalyst, causing a fracture of connectedness when the glue that holds the Ward family together was suddenly torn apart. For Natalie what was once predictable and imperceptible suddenly seems to be accelerating with an almost unimaginable force. Part of her growth is that she must come to terms with how much has been lost and left behind even as she tries to understand how River came to the Wards, became a part of them and, how he ultimately forced them to confront their deepest fears and desires. Mike Leonard May 08.

Amazing Book
This was truly a work of art. I gave it only 4 stars only because of its slow beginning; it took several pages of background story to get to the main plot. However, it was well worth the wait and I was not disappointed when the big secret is revealed. There are so many themes to this book that I can't even begin to name them all. So many surprizes that I didn't see coming, and beautifully written prose to tell the story with. I highly recommend this book and look forward to her next novel. I can't believe this was her first! Other authors would do well to take some character and plot development instruction from Donna Milner.