A River So Long

Vallie Lynn Watson's debut novel follows thirty-something Veronica as she jolts between five-star hotels in New Orleans, New York, and the North Carolina coast. Veronica's business keeps her on the move, and further strains her relationships with the already unsuitable men she's met along the way, not to mention her blink-and-you-miss-him husband. A River So Long, like Veronica's life, is a fragmented conflation of time, place, and people-she's a gypsy, and the world she inhabits is, if not blurry, at least kaleidoscopic. This remarkable novel reads like Jean Rhys run over by the twenty-first century-a rushing, threatening, constantly changing scene with a tumultuous, multiplying cast.