Enjoyed listening to this book on CD. It interwove multiple generations. However she has a one armed man holding a lantern and a woman's hand. He puts down the lantern then lets go of her hand. How does that work? Also Clement doesn't know what Heddie was talking about when she says they were looking for Jacques' treasure. However I thought I remembered them fantasizing what they would do with it when they found it earlier in the story.

The ending was melancholy, which fit well I thought. ( )

Really a 3.5. Amazing writing but definitely hard to follow sometimes. ( )

I started out liking this book, but halfway in, I couldn't wait to be done with it. A modern-day bride finds a series of notebooks in the family home and reads the story of Annie Lark, a young girl who became trapped by a felled beam during an earthquake. Her fearful family leave her to die on her own, but she is rescued by Jacques Ducharmes, a French fur trader, and Annie lives with him as his wife. Jacques begins to play out his dream of building a hotel to serve passersby on the Mississippi. All of which is interesting enough, but then I hit a series of grisly scenes of animal abuse, stabbings, and a baby ripped open by dogs, Ugh. And this pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the book, which follows the Ducharmes women through the decades. Each one is married to a violent man with criminal dealings. Plus the story keeps jumping back and forth through time and family additions (half brothers, slave mistresses, etc.). Maybe if I hadn't been so bored and disgusted, I wouldn't have had such a hard time keeping track of who was whom and how they were all related. But the bottom line is that I hated them all and really didn't care. Not to mention that Agee throws in a bit of mumbo jumbo as Jacques supposedly has made a pact with the devil and barely ages. It has been a long time since I was this glad to have finished a book. ( )

I agree with a previous reviewer - Annie Lark and Jacques were great and strong characters. The last third of the book was uninteresting for me and I just became bored and stopped reading it. ( )

I agree with a previous reviewer - Annie Lark and Jacques were great and strong characters. The last third of the book was uninteresting for me and I just became bored and stopped reading it. ( )

Bogged down over half way through. Not one likeable character. Out it goes. ( )

Wow, I don't often come across a book that I can't get through. I made it 120 pages in and I couldn't go any farther. It was an unpleasant, badly written book. Sorry, but when writing a novel, the incredibly mundane lives of early 19th century people, are not interesting. I gave it 0 stars, a first for me.

The New Madrid earthquake is the beginning of this novel, and the natural history of the area is an underlying symbol of life at the side of the treacherous, changeable Mississippi River, from sand boils to hardwood forests. A fascinating cast of characters takes this family tale through three generations, with the focus on the women who try to hold things together. I loved the interweaving of the stories and the strength of the women, each of whom is a "River Wife." Not a happy-endings type of story, but a realistic, gritty novel of hard times, betrayal, love and loyalty. ( )

I like the reviewer below me (Emily) who did her review of this book on a plus and minus system. I have trouble with family history books that span generations--Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I am looking deeply into your eyes--because it gets so hard to keep everyone straight, and because, let's be real, you never really care about the later generations. So many pluses for the earlier parts of this story, and for Omah the Pirate definitely, but not so much on the later tales (Dealie, Laura, etc.) because they don't grab nearly as much. Treat it like a Faulkner, lots of individual stories about country(wo)men getting royally f-ed, and you'll be much happier. ( )

I will be honest, I bought the book for the cover. Then I started reading and found that I knew of the areas Agee wrote about. That made the book all the more intriguing.
The story can be a little disturbing, and it covers several generations of one family living on one plot of land. To me, the hardships made it all the more real. There seem to be surprises around every corner. ( )

I wanted to like this book, and I really did like her style of writing. But there were too many stories, too many unanswered questions, too many superfluous characters. The stand-by-your-man parts were irritating, but I've met too many women like that in real life. I don't like it but I know it's out there. I can't say I didn't find it interesting, just frustrating, because I'd be getting interested in a chapter, and then *poof* we were someplace else. Kind of like watching television with a man... ( )

The only reason I finished this book was to see if it made any sense at the end- it doesn't. I read this with a group and I think everyone left feeling the same way- disappointed and confused. What drives me crazy is that this had SO much potential, Agee just didn't deliver.
The characters are all so promising and well written but the point of the whole story never comes to a head, it just kind of floats along brining up miscombobulated bits of the past that makes you THINK it's all connected when it's really not.
I feel unfulfilled after reading this book. ( )

These stories of the Ducharme women of Jacques' Landing, MO, begin in the early 1800's and continue until the years of the Great Depression. It was difficult to read about such a harsh existence and even harder to read about such weak women who continually made bad decisions. Unfortunately, Annie, the most interesting character in the story, disappears midway in the book. Just as Annie faded away after the tragedy in her life, the promising beginning fizzled out.

This book just did not work for me. The mystical scenes were more muddled than mysterious, and there was way too much drama for my taste. I should have given up after reading the most explicit disturbing scene I have encountered in my reading. Hint and ***Spoiler*** -- it involves a mad dog and a baby. I advise that you pass up on this book if you are squeamish and don't want your sleep disturbed. ( )

Several generations of a family living along the banks of the Missouri River are chronicled here. The river and the history of the river direct the course of this families life. Haunted by the lives, and slometimes the very ghosts, of their ancestors, each generation must come to terms with the history of their family and their place in the world. Each of the individuals makes decisions for survival, some honorable and some not so. But each of these decisions help the family to survive and to push into the next generation.

Agee's prose is lyrical and beautiful in ways that many authors struggle for their whole careers. There is a poetry to her descriptions of the land, the people who work it, and the events which shape their lives. Agee's ear for the peculiar language of the area is unique and dead on. Her characters are complete and deep and, even when they are not likable, they are intriguing. Agee has been overlooked for far too long and this novel, the most widely marketed, deserves the attention of readers.

5 bones!!!! ( )

4418. The River Wife a novel, by Jonis Agee (read 9 Mar 2008) This starts interestingly in the earthquake times at New Madrid, Missouri, but goes on and on, jumping back and forth between various eras. A genealogical table of the characters would be helpful for those who don't want to devote a lot of time to figuring out who is who. I confess I often wished the book would end. None of the white characters are crime-free and so not any are very admirable. There is an element of fantasy about some events and many of the events do not seem credible. And behavior seems jerky and unexpected often. I like novels to be more straightforward than this one is, though once or twice I thought of Thomas Wolfe as I read passages of this book ( )

i loved this book!!!! i loved and hated characters even after i read the book it was a long read but you could not stop you cared that much about what happened to these woman ( )

I received this book as part of LibraryThing's Early Reviewer program but have delayed posting a review as I set the book down about a third of the way through and still haven't been compelled to return to it. On the plus side, the book vividly depicts life on this part of the American Frontier, in particular the brutality of the life. (Although I found some of the scenes of brutality to be over the top in terms of plausibility.) On the minus side, I was puzzled by the fact that although the reader is supposedly hearing Annie's story through her journals, the author chose to tell Annie's story in the third person. I wonder what this part of the story would have been like in Annie's voice. I suspect that a lot of the historical detail might have been lost as Annie likely wouldn't have written about minute details of frontier life in her journal, but we might have gained a closer connection with Annie herself.

I received The River Wife as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. The River Wife is a bold and ambitious novel, and it is easy to see why it took Jonis Agee so long to research and write it. She has an incredible eye for detail, and her descriptions of the characters and the time periods in which they lived make them seem to jump off the page. The central character in this novel is Jacques Ducharme, a fur trader who rescues a young woman from her flooded home and makes her his wife. All of the other characters are somehow connected to Ducharme and are forced to live with the consequences of his actions, which become increasingly selfish and irrational as the years go by. Agee does an excellent job of getting inside these characters' heads and explaining why they do the things they do. However, at times I found myself getting bogged down in the details and missing the bigger picture. Some of the transitions were less than smooth, and although the plot was always interesting, it seemed to fall apart a bit at the end. Despite this, I was satisfied with the way the story ended. Overall, I found this to be a compelling if not always coherent novel about love, madness and family secrets. ( )

Like many other reviewers, I had mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, I didn't want to put it down, and was caught up in the character's lives immediately. I was particularly invested in Annie's story and couldn't wait to get back to her whenever the perspective shifted. Later characters weren't quite as compelling, although I found myself still reading eagerly, curious about how the other characters' stories would connect to Annie's and whether justice would ever be served to Jacques.

Unlike some other reviewers, I didn't mind the dreams, ghosts, and other mystical happenings, which are a part of many excellent novels, and which were used here well.

However, I was very bothered by the intense violence, cruelty, and apparent lack of conscience which were central to the novel. It was this aspect which made me decide this book was not a "keeper." ( )

I received The River Wife, by Jonis Agee, as an early reviewer. Although I had expected to receive a different book, I was delighted by this one, from the very beginning. The publishers were supposed to be matching books to reader preferences, and in this case they did very well. This is exactly the kind of novel I would pick up in the store--from the cover through the blurbs on the back--and I was not disappointed by the story.

It's a story of strong women and strong family ties. It follows the interwoven lives of families in a tiny town on the Mississippi, through several generations. There are pirates, with treasure; gangsters; farmers; and ghosts. The author effectively evokes everyday life during each era with details that ring true, but includes magical, mysterious elements as well--something I enjoy.

The characters are unique, and we care about their lives and stories. This was a book I hated to put down, yet didn’t want to finish, as I enjoyed the reading of it so much. I wanted to find out what happened, so on I went. It is filled with drama and adventure, and beautifully written. It would be a great book club read, as there are lots of moral issues, compelling stories, and interesting scenes and characters to explore and discuss.

I picked up Jonis Agee's Strange Angels a few years back because contemporary westerns appeal to me; this tale of Nebraskan siblings turned out to be particularly appealing since its characters listened to Dwight Yoakam practically as much as I did. (And when I reached the acknowledgements page and saw his name listed there I experienced a moment of kinship with Agee, who revealed herself to be as big a fan as I.)

So I was quick to sign up for Library Thing's Early Review program when I saw that Agee's latest, The River Wife, was one of the offerings.

I wish I could report a continued feeling of kinship, of being the bull's eye in the target audience, but my impressions on this one are decidedly mixed.

It starts well, on the courthhouse steps on the 1930 wedding day of already-pregnant 17-year-old Hedie Rails to Clement Ducharme, great-grandson of the man for whom the river town is named, and then moves to the Ducharme family home. Over the next several months on the nights that Clement receives mysterious phone calls and disappears for hours or days afterwards, Hedie turns to the row of old diaries and journals that were kept by Jacques Ducharme's first wife Annie Lark, and begins to find striking parallels between her life and that of the first "river wife."

Annie Lark's story begins in the immediate aftermath of the 1811 New Madrid earthquake on the banks of the Mississippi River. Pinned in her bed by a fallen roof beam, and abandoned by her devout family after being told that her delivery would need to come from God, 16-year-old Annie is instead rescued three days later by the type of man her father has always warned her about--a French fur trapper.

Jacques Ducharme nurses Annie back to health and her early years with him, albeit years of nomadic wandering or primitive cabin living, are idyllic. It is not until Ducharme decides to open an inn for river travelers that Annie realizes her husband is without scruple: he kills a slave trader not to free his abused captives, but to obtain them for his own purposes. Before long, Ducharme has become a full-fledged pirate, a heavy drinker and a philanderer, and while crippled Annie cannot bring herself to leave him or stop loving him, they are definitely estranged.

My problems with the book started about this time. Agee provides an elaborate set-up for a horrific death scene that I still could not find the least bit believable; and I resented the forced parallel in Hedie's portion of the story. After Annie's journals come to an end, Hedie continues to learn family history from the women who'd lived at Jacques' Landing --Omah, a freed slave turned pirate, then companion to the Ducharme family; Laura, Jacques' second wife; and Maddie, Jacques' daughter and Clement's mother--via ghostly visitations and dreams. Of course, with such a contrivance in place, it makes no sense to have Anne's ghost show Maddie (and the reader) where Jacques' treasure is stored when the novel is going to end with Hedie searching for it--she wants to hold on to Jacques' Landing for her own son, the last thing anyone who knows the family history as well as she does ought to be doing.

And no Dwight. But it did remind me of two Emmylou Harris songs: "Heaven Ain't Ready For You Yet" (a ballad about Jesse James) and "Loving the Highway Man" (a duet with Linda Ronstadt).

If your tastes run to multigenerational Southern gothic novels, you might like this one. Me, I'm hoping Agee goes back to writing realistic contemporary westerns.

http://pagesturned.blogspot.com/2007/07/river-wife.html

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.

I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program. I thank Dick and TimmyPal for their invaluable suggestions. ( )

I received this an ARC and so looked forward to reading it. I think it started out strong but got bogged down with ghosts. It is a multi-generational story about 4 women and their relationship with Jacques Ducharme. I really liked the story and the characters, just thought the ghost parts unbelievable and unnecessary. If you like historical fiction you would probably enjoy this. This is the first book I have read by this author, but would definitely read more. ( )

The River Wife by Jonis Agee is a multigenerational, epic novel covering the lives of five women related either by marriage, partnership, or birth to the 19th-century French fur-trapper and river pirate, Jacques Ducharme. These are the stories of Ducharme women—Annie Lark, Laura, Omah, Maddie, and Heide. Their stories cover the period from the great New Madrid earthquake of 1812, through the Civil War, and into the bootlegging era of the 1930s. These women inhabit a wild, harsh land in the boot heel of Tennessee, a difficult unforgiving place. Each Ducharme woman is unique, but they share the same traits of intelligence, beauty and headstrong passion for a better life. Some radiate warmth, gentleness, forgiveness, and loyalty. Others hide cunning and manipulation. In the end, each woman falls prey to, and must find some way to deal with, the charm and all-consuming possessive love of Jacques Ducharme—a man who is as charismatic as he is ruthless.

This is not a romance novel. The ecstasy of being in love, the slow process of learning to love, and the utter devastation of being the focus of narcissistic love are central to the text. But the major theme of this novel is more subtle. The five women at the heart of this novel feel chained, and each seeks her own unique path to freedom and self-fulfillment. Some succeed well, others succeed with significant compromise, and some fail. This is a redemptive tale about the life-changing choices that move us toward self-fulfillment. Don't expect these five Ducharme women to be bigger than life; this book is not epic in that definition of the word. These are everyday, fully realistic heroines—women who must survive whatever way they can.

Agee's prose is cinematic. The overall experience is like watching an addictive miniseries. There is a lot happening, with many parallels between the different women. There is danger, violence, suspense, ghostly apparitions, treachery, pirate's treasure, intrigue, and murder—enough to keep almost anyone's interest piqued. Even the famous naturalist John James Audubon makes a brief, stunning appearance and has an important impact on the plot. But don’t expect a fast-paced novel; this is a subtle, slow, lyrical, sensual, and heart-felt novel about what it means to make life-changing choices.

Typically, I shy away from multigenerational novels. But, I had plenty of time, and a desire to find out what all the fuss was about this notable, prize-winning author. So, I let this book take possession of me and I was mesmerized. What I enjoyed best about this book are its many take-your-breath-away, astonishing, wide-screen images—like hidden treasure—so lyrical and lovely that they will probably stick with me for a lifetime. Take, for example, the singularly startling image of crippled, weak, grief-stricken Annie Lark, secured to a chair, resting on a small wooden platform, hoisted up into highest branches of a tall tree, and there, for hours on end gazing out over the far expanses of the flat Mississippi bottomland, feeling the breeze, and closely studying the insects and birds. Here we are spellbound while Annie Lark experiences the first stirrings of freedom and self-discovery. This is powerful stuff. No wonder so many have made so much about this talented author. ( )

Received from Random House as part of the early readers program.

Agee deftly interweaves the stories of four women in this historical novel. The book is centered around the four most important women in the life of French fur-trapper Jacques Ducharme. Ducharme's legacy stretches from the grave across four generations to impact the lives of all who call Jacques' Landing their home.
Set in Mississippi during the nineteenth century, The River Wife, mixes history, life style, a bit of mysticism and some great story telling to bring to life the saga of the those who settle in Jacques Landing.
I read one other novel of Agee's, many years ago. After completing this book I will be hunting down some of her prior titles. Agee tells a great tale, she is able to thread the past and the present together in a seemless manner.
I was a book seller in a small independant bookstore that has been forced to close it's doors. I know how important recommendations are to those who are looking for something new to read. The River Wife would be one of those titles I would be highly recommending to customers. The book would make a great "book club" read. ( )