Editor Reviews:

Product Description:
From acclaimed novelist Jonis Agee, whom The New York Times Book Review called “a gifted poet of that dark lushness in the heart of the American landscape,” The River Wife is a sweeping, panoramic story that ranges from the New Madrid earthquake of 1811 through the Civil War to the bootlegging days of the 1930s.

When the earthquake brings Annie Lark’s Missouri house down on top of her, she finds herself pinned under the massive roof beam, facing certain death. Rescued by French fur trapper Jacques Ducharme, Annie learns to love the strong, brooding man and resolves to live out her days as his “River Wife.”

More than a century later, in 1930, Hedie Rails comes to Jacques’ Landing to marry Clement Ducharme, a direct descendant of the fur trapper and river pirate, and the young couple begin their life together in the very house Jacques built for Annie so long ago. When, night after late night, mysterious phone calls take Clement from their home, a pregnant Hedie finds comfort in Annie’s leather-bound journals. But as she reads of the sinister dealings and horrendous misunderstandings that spelled out tragedy for the rescued bride, Hedie fears that her own life is paralleling Annie’s, and that history is repeating itself with Jacques’ kin.

Among the family’s papers, Hedie encounters three other strong-willed women who helped shape Jacques Ducharme’s life–Omah, the freed slave who took her place beside him as a river raider; his second wife, Laura, who loved money more than the man she married; and Laura and Jacques’ daughter, Maddie, a fiery beauty with a nearly uncontrollable appetite for love. Their stories, together with Annie’s, weave a haunting tale of this mysterious, seductive, and ultimately dangerous man, a man whose hand stretched over generations of women at a bend in the river where fate and desire collide.

The River Wife richly evokes the nineteenth-century South at a time when lives changed with the turn of a card or the flash of a knife. Jonis Agee vividly portrays a lineage of love and heartbreak, passion and deceit, as each river wife comes to discover that blind devotion cannot keep the truth at bay, nor the past from haunting the present.


From the Hardcover edition.

Rating : - Jonis Agee is ambitious...
Jonis Agee is an ambitious novelist who'll take a risk. In "The River Wife" she has written a "Western" (how many women writers have tried THAT?) that explores - through the eyes of five very different women - the settlement of a small parcel of land along the Mississippi River in Missouri from 1811, the year of the New Madrid earthquake, until the 1930s.

The life of each woman in this sprawling saga has been touched by her relationship with the French fur-trapper and amoral river pirate Jacques Ducharme. From Annie Lark, the teenager left for dead by her family after the earthquake, who Ducharme rescued and loved, to Hedie Rails, the woman Jacques' bootlegger grandson would marry in 1930, Agee weaves a tapestry of complex themes: isolation, hardship, identity and independence, loyalty and friendship, unspeakable violence and desolation.

Not all the women are as beautifully drawn as Annie Lark and Omah, Jacques' partner in crime. Laura, Jacques' second wife, is manipulated more like a paper doll than a human character. (Perhaps I have a bias against gold-diggers?)

The violence in the book may not be suitable for young or squeamish readers.

Agee's risk pays off. "The River Wife" offers its characters remarkably rich personal histories and explores the consequences of their decisions. The action and uncompromising violence are compelling. If only a thoughtful movie producer would buy this book, we'd be treated to five strong female roles and a potential Oscar-winning male role in a gritty compelling drama. An "Unforgiven" with a feminine twist.