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The River Wife: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Jonis Agee
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
Buy Used: $4.65
You Save: $9.35 (67%)
New (39) from $6.74
Avg. Customer Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 85157
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 432
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 081297719X
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780812977196
ASIN: 081297719X
Publication Date: May 27, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
Jonis Agee is ambitious... October 9, 2008
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.
Page-turner October 6, 2008
I am enjoying this book and find it to be a page-turner. The prose is lush and, being a Missouri native, her description of how the river influences life is accurate and reminds me of home.
Well done.
 "There's just no way of knowing the infinite devices we have to stitch ourselves together across time." July 4, 2008
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
Agee's fascinating story bridges the lives of two women over a century apart, Annie Lark Ducharme and Hedie Rails Ducharme. Annie is trapped in the earthquake of 1811, her family's cabin near the mighty Mississippi collapsing in the earth's sudden violence. Immobilized by a roof beam, Annie is left to die by her family, clinging to life day by day while in agonizing pain. When French trapper and river pirate, Jacques Ducharme, rescues the helpless girl, it is inevitable that she fall in love with this rough but tender man who wants only to protect her and build a home that will stand as a testament to them, Jacques Landing, a place of refuge for weary river travelers and traders. Annie becomes his "river wife", living rough until they return to the banks of the river and begin building Jacques' dream, Annie pregnant with their child. The building progresses against all odds, although Jacques and his cohorts revert to their piracy to find the means.
Despite her older husband's flaws, Annie is happy, reluctant to defy this man of such great ambition. Then a truly monstrous event destroys any forgiveness that exists between them, neither able to recapture their prior hopefulness. Though other Ducharme women people Jacques' life, including his second wife, Laura Burke Shut Ducharme, who gives an ageing man a new lease on life, none can replace his passion for Annie. In 1930, Hedie Rails Ducharme arrives, the naive young bride of the older Clement Ducharme, returning with him to Jacques Landing where they act out the fate of a family blighted by tragedy and ill-starred relationships. Like Annie, Hedie is hopelessly in love; like Jacques, Clement lives outside the law, leaving his pregnant wife alone at night with the unfamiliar groaning of the house while he pursues whatever criminal enterprise draws him away night after night.
Hedie's only solace is in Annie's diaries, which she pours over through the long, dark hours waiting for Clement to return, aware only that she is connected to Annie and the other river wives who have been a part of the Ducharme legacy. Detailing the private hopes and sorrows of these women, from Annie, Laura, the enigmatic Omah, who learns the ways of piracy from Jacques himself, to Hedie, who will add her story to Annie's, this novel is rich in regional history. Agee's images rise from the past, the waiting, patient river, the aggressive, dangerous men, the Landing that draws all manner of traveler and the women who bring heart to a tale of tragedy and violence begun with Jacques and ending with Clement. The river runs in the blood of these men and the women seduced by their natural charm, even when that love is defeated by greed, ambition and disillusion. A powerful tale, here is the essence of the river, the country and the women blinded by their passions. Luan Gaines/ 2008.
A great summer read June 8, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This, grand, sweeping, epic novel makes for great summer reading. Full of cinematic scenes, this book is richly detailed and beautifully executed, beginning with a vivid evocation of the New Madrid earthquake, and including a violent attack by pirates of a merchant vessel on the Mississippi, a lushly romantic encounter between two women taking a cure at Hot Springs, ghostly visitations, and a harrowing barn fire. The many marriages of long-lived Jacques Ducharme and his descendants are an album of the types of love possible in relationships: passionate, devoted, protective, companionable, and enduring. Read this book!
Relentless and compelling as the Mississippi River itself January 16, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The past continually haunts the present in Jonis Agee's historical novel THE RIVER WIFE, the story of four generations of women whose lives are intertwined with charismatic, larger-than-life Jacques Ducharme.
The first woman to be introduced (but last chronologically) is Hedie Ducharme, a teenaged, pregnant bride who, in 1930, comes with her new husband Clement to live at his family's house in Missouri's far southeastern bootheel region. The house is known as Jacques' Landing. Estranged from her family, often left alone by her husband for days at a time, Hedie turns to the journals she finds in the house's library. In their pages, she discovers clues not only to Jacques, the house's namesake, but also to the several women whose lives were intertwined with his.
The first woman --- who stands at the spiritual and emotional heart of the novel --- is Annie Lark, who has been trapped in the wreckage of the devastating 1812 New Madrid Earthquake. Abandoned by her family, nearly dead of starvation and thirst, Annie embraces her savior and gladly joins him in a new kind of life on the fringes of society. When Jacques decides to settle down and build a house and an inn on land near the Mississippi, she gladly joins in his dreams of prosperity and wealth.
Crippled for life by her injuries, soon beset by a devastating personal tragedy and with a series of betrayals, Annie gradually grows disillusioned with Jacques and with their marriage. After her death, her ghostly presence seems to haunt the women who follow her --- including a former slave, as well as Jacques' conniving second wife and their daughter Maddie.
As Hedie reads these journals, Annie's presence also haunts her life 100 years later. Hedie's life, from her pregnancy to her relationship with Clement, seems to have precedents in the lives of those women who came to Jacques' Landing before her. Surrounded by mystery and violence, these women find solace and safety in small magic, charms and talismans that often reappear over and over again. Hedie reflects on these protective objects: "We have so little that isn't too fragile to bear our living."
The novel's Ozark setting, particularly the threat of earthquakes and the simultaneously benevolent and menacing presence of the Mississippi River, informs much of the action. Living on the fringes of society, Jacques and his women are freed to live an almost lawless existence, isolated from both progress and propriety. Southern Gothic elements are also at work in the novel, from supernatural sightings to grotesque violence to an almost suffocating atmosphere. Agee, for the most part, ties together the women's stories effectively, only occasionally bogging down in explanations of the tangled family tree. As a whole, though, the story of Jacques' women sweeps along as relentlessly and compellingly as the Mississippi River itself.
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
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