A young woman meets a man on the road, dirty and a runaway, and chooses him over her previous life. Victoria had lived with men since her mother died, a brother Seth who was born angry and short-tempered, her father a man of few words and an uncle who enjoyed stirring things up and watching what happened.

It is a story that has been told time and time again. A young woman becomes pregnant, leaves home to have the baby, has to give her baby up and then spends the rest of her life dreaming and thinking of him and what he is like. It’s a simple story but one made different through the context it is told in. The context for Baby Love by Jacqueline Wilson is the age of the mother, too young, I Couldn’t Love you More by Esther Freud that involves the Magdalena laundries of Ireland and Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These where a man who delivers coal is surprised to find unwanted girls, one of whom is pregnant, living in a coal cellar, placed there by the nuns, and links it to his own childhood and his mother.

No matter how it is told, this is always a sad, sad story and in Go As A River it is no different. The context for this book is Colarado, the rivers, mountains and forests and the 40s and 50s where skin colour matters, particularly when the young man is Native American. It is the story of how Victoria endures all that is thrown at her and how the peach trees help her put down roots in a new place and create a new life, still with elements of the old life never forgotten.

There were parts of the book that were short on detail, for instance the birth of the child up in a mountain hut on her own and other parts that we were able to see clearly – the land, rivers and local people. It is well-written and it did make me cry towards the end but it isn’t a book with any surprises.