No River Too Wide
By Emilie Richards
Publisher: Harlequin
MIRA
Release Date: June
24, 2014
Janine Stoddard has spent twenty-five years as the wife of
an abusive husband, but there is still enough spirit left in her to seize the
opportunity to escape when she is offered help by Moving On, an underground
highway for abused women. One night when her husband is away, she puts her
carefully conceived plan into effect, leaving her luxurious Topeka, Kansas, prison
in flames. Janine has refused contact with her daughter because she feared her
husband would somehow discover Harmony’s location, but she longs to see her
daughter and the nine-month-old granddaughter she has never met before she
settles somewhere to begin a new life. Thus, she heads for Asheville, North
Carolina, for what she plans to be a brief stop before moving on to New Hampshire
where she hopes to be safe.
Harmony has checked the Topeka
Capiatal-Journal every few weeks since her mother told her never to call home
again more than a year ago, expecting to see a headline reporting her mother’s
death. She’s heartbroken but not surprised when she thinks her mother has
perished in the fire, but surprised is an understatement of her feelings when
her mother shows up on the farm outside Asheville where Harmony works as a
Jill-of-all-trades and lives in a garage apartment. Harmony’s friend Taylor
Martin sees offering Jan a home as a way of repaying Harmony for all that
Harmony did for Taylor’s mother. With Taylor living twenty miles away on the
other side of Asheville, Jan will be away from Harmony but close enough for the
Jan to see her daughter and granddaughter occasionally. When Taylor tells Jan
that her being with Taylor’s eleven-year-old daughter when Taylor has to be
away on school nights will be a help, Jan agrees to stay.
Richards deftly weaves together the stories of these three
women and adds the mystery of Rex’s Stoddard’s disappearance to complicate
things. Despite the insurance fraud thread and a romance between the cautious
Taylor and Adam Pryor, a new man in town with secrets of his own, No River Too Wide is a story about
growth and forgiveness, including self-forgiveness, which may be more difficult
than forgiving others.
Emilie Richards is one of the writers whose books I began
reading in the 1980s and have followed her from category fiction to single-title
contemporary romance to mystery to women’s fiction and enjoyed each phase of the
journey. No River Too Wide, the third
book in her Goddesses Anonymous series, has the emotionally rich contexts and
layered characters that have kept me reading this author for nearly three
decades. Whether she is writing about troubled marriages, complex family
dynamics, the tendrils of the past that cling to human lives, or any one of a
dozen or more social issues that touch the lives of her characters--and her
readers--Emilie Richards is one of the best writers in popular fiction.
Books about battered women have become common in recent
years, but few show as full a portrait of a woman abused over decades as
Richards offers in this book. Alternately heart-rending and inspiring, No River Too Wide reveals a woman almost
destroyed by physical and psychological abuse who has the courage to accept
help, one who gradually forgives herself, regains her self-respect, and
acquires a new appreciation of the freedom to make choices and to grow into an
independent woman.
Although Harmony was a lesser target of her father’s abuse
than was her mother and, with her mother’s help, she escaped as soon as she
graduated from high school, she bears her own scars. She loves her mother, but
she also blames her for not leaving sooner. She is also suspicious of lives
that seem too perfect from the outside, having experienced the horror that
could be concealed behind the happy family image.
Taylor learned some painful lessons through her estrangement
and reconciliation with her mother (One
Mountain Away). She explains to her daughter Maddie:
But Taylor’s learning is incomplete; she still finds it difficult to forgive when people fall short of her expectations.
One of the joys of reading this book is seeing the growth that
takes place in many characters from the three women who are primary to baby
Lottie’s father. For readers who like a romance line even in their women’s
fiction, there is Taylor’s relationship with Adam, a man who wants to do the
right thing but finds it difficult to reconcile his professional
responsibilities with the dictates of his conscience. I also liked Harmony’s
reentry to the world of dating and her admission that Mr. Perfect may also be
Mr. Not Right for me.
I’m sure it is clear by now that I loved No River Too Wide. It’s another Richards keeper for me, and I highly recommend it. I do feel I should add one caveat: this book can be read as a standalone, but readers who have not read One Mountain Away may feel as if Harmony and Taylor’s stories are incomplete. Reading the two books makes for a richer, more meaningful reading experience. The second book, Somewhere Between Luck and Trust, is also excellent, but it is more loosely connected.
Do you have a keeper shelf? What’s your most recent addition to it?
