Once Upon a River

Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield

     The story begins with storytellers. Once upon a time upon a river there is an inn called The Swan on the river Thames in Radcot. The specialty at this inn was storytelling. The people in the village took pride in their story telling, they aspired to it.  Telling stories helped the long winters pass and on one particular winter evening a man arrives, gravely injured and bleeding and he is holding a small girl.  A small dead girl.  As things are sorted out, the man cared for, the girl taken away to a side room, the storytelling both stopped and gained a life of its own, because a little after the child is laid down, she takes a breath and is once again living.  Who can die and come back to life after an hour?  Who is the child?  Who are her parents and where did she come from?  Is she even real? She isn’t talking and the man who carried her in doesn’t know, either.

     As the storytellers depart into the night and give wings to the events at The Swan, three people come to claim the child.  A young couple whose daughter was kidnapped two years earlier claim the child is theirs. Certainly, of course she looks a bit different, but she was a toddler then and is a young girl now. 

     Then there is a man named Quietly.  Quietly plies the river in his boat, sometimes rescuing people and bringing them to safety, and thus a longer life, and sometimes he takes them to the other shore. People know of Quietly and some have claimed to been saved by him but he is elusive.

     To another family this child belongs to their estranged son.  She is their family, and he no longer is, so it’s important to claim her and raise her as their own.  It would be so much easier if the child could talk.

     Each family has staked a claim on the young girl and each has their own story, but don’t we all have our own story? We can all take bits and pieces from these people and fit those bits into our own stories.

     Once you sit down with Diane Setterfield’s new book, you might as well give yourself up to it, don’t fight it, don’t answer the phone, don’t make plans.  In Once Upon a River there is something of being carried away by our imaginations and the possibilities of truth but there is always and on every page the magic of the author’s writing.  I couldn’t wait to read this and I couldn’t stop.