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Jac Douglas _ac_ouglas — For no particular reason, I've read several novels lately about young women fending for themselves in rural and remote landscapes — Terese Svoboda's Bohemian Girl, Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone, and Bonnie Jo Campbell's Once Upon A River. I don't know if it's coincidence or shifting cultural interests, but I'm glad these books are coming in a genre that's so typically masculine. Rather than summarize a story that's already been summarized in so many reviews, I'll just say that as with those novels mentioned above what makes this Once Upon A River compelling is its protagonist. Margo Crane is a great character, steadfast and stubborn and lost all at once, so even as she makes some unfortunate, often dangerous choices she's believable and sympathetic. Once Upon A River makes a really compelling, understated critique of its genre, of wilderness fiction and the adventure story, by allowing Margo to do things often taken for granted for male characters (eg, rugged self-sufficiency, promiscuity, violence, etc.) yet unlikely for women in fiction. Margo's idolization and emulation of Annie Oakley gave this a provocative complexity, as did the way her quiet presence allowed every man she met to project their own desires onto her even as we readers know she's a more multi-faceted person than they allow for. There's also a nostalgic vein that runs through the novel, though not a rose-tinted one. More than once characters refer to Margo and her desire to be left alone living a riverside life of hunting as a "throwback," and I couldn't help thinking the novel's near-past setting (1980-ish, I think?) made some of this more easily explained. Economic problems and cultural changes are creeping in at the edges of the story, through closing factories and other things, but it's still very much a pre-internet, pre-cellphone story that might not have been as believable with a more recent setting. There's a grungy wistfulness to that, looking back on a time that had it's problems but they aren't, quite our problems. That's not a critique, just a curiosity, because I wonder to what extent it was a deliberate authorial choice in order to make Margo's story believable, and also wonder what kind of story could be told about a character like Margo thirty years later. Would the landscape allow it? Or the law? Would it be possible for a young woman to "vanish" quite so successfully? Again, none of those are problems with the novel, just questions I was left with after reading it. And to my mind the better a book, the better the questions it leaves behind.