This year’s All Pikes Peak Reads selection offers more than just good fiction. It also provides a Colorado history lesson. “Go As a River,” by Shelley Read, is the featured book in Pikes Peak Library District’s annual community reading program.
“We haven’t done a fiction book in years,” said PPLD Senior Librarian Heidi Buljung. “It’s historical fiction so it opens your eyes to a lesser known part of Colorado history. It’s great that it packs true historical events into a narrative of a young woman’s life.
” Read, who graduated from Doherty High School and now lives on the Western Slope in Gunnison Valley, was inspired by the destruction of the small ranch town of Iola in Gunnison County. In the mid-1960s the Blue Mesa Dam and Reservoir project flooded the town and forced hundreds of families to relocate. The novel introduces readers to Victoria Nash, a 17-year-old who runs her family’s household on their Iola peach farm and has a life-changing chance encounter with a drifter displaced from his tribal land.
After a tragedy, Victoria flees her home and takes shelter in the surrounding mountains, where she struggles to survive as the Gunnison River threatens to submerge her town and home. The 2023 book has been optioned for movie rights. The book is available now at all PPLD branches, as well as in eBook and eAudio formats.
Read will give a free presentation and do a meet and greet and book signing Oct. 5 at Library 21c. To complement the book, PPLD will.