The River's Memory

by Sandra Gail Lambert

"A simply outstanding novel" - Midwest Book Review

A woman born without legs spends her days swimming with manatees. Two artists, separated by centuries, guide each other's hands. And a child of the Florida frontier sits on the graves of her siblings to think about race relations and the habits of caterpillars. These are some of the women who live along the banks of a river where water billows from caverns of silent lakes. None of them are famous. None of them have children. Instead, their stories exist in a mosaic of time and shadowed history, and the things of the river - clay and water, trees and bone - carry their memories forward.

Genres: Short Stories, Nature, Disability, Fiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Sandra Gail Lambert writes about the intersections of disability, queerness, and aging. She's the author of the Lambda Literary Award winning My Withered Legs and Other Essays and the memoir A Certain Loneliness as well as two novels—The River's Memory and The Sacrifice Zone: An Environmental Thriller. Her work is widely anthologized and has been published by The New York Times, The Sun, Orion, Uncharted, and Narratively. Lambert lives in Florida close to her beloved rivers and swamps. .

Reviews

[Glenda Bailey-Mershon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is easily one of the best books I've read in years. Totally original, with transcendent language, it lingers with me months after reading it, the way a river might wind through one's dreams. The multiple women who inhabit or visit the riverbank setting are all struggling against boundaries that threaten to strangle their own sense of direction. Some are exuberant, some rebellious; some hide from the world away from their watery retreat, while others meet their quests with buoyant courage. One story of a dying woman whose lover restrains her own grief to aid her loved one's passage literally took my breath away with its bone-deep portrait of true love. Because the river itself is so meticulously and passionately portrayed over millenia, this book gives us leave to meditate on how humans evolve in fits and starts and impossible leaps of faith, how we might still, over eons, become somehow worthy of our remarkable planet. A tour de force that richly deserves consideration by every reader who has traipsed through muck and loved every minute of it.

[Rhonda Riley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a lovely book. It is about a river and the women who have lived near it. I have been in the Silver River and swam its cousins. Lambert got it right. Her descriptions are vivid, right on, and luscious. This book covers centuries and follows several lives that all cross a single spot on the Silver River. Each character is unique and distinct. If you love beautiful language, nature, or historical fiction, if you are an artist or have ever wanted to be one, this book will resonate for you. There is a real range of characters – I am tempted to list them, but don’t want to spoil the read for you. You won’t forget them. The final chapter is a leap that will leave you thinking beyond the river.

[Michele · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been reading for 50 years, and this is one of the most memorable novels I have read. Ever. Period.

Why?
1. Sandra Lambert's prose is vivid, precise, lush with sensory details and with phrases that provoke thought.
2. Her characters are mythic, but perfectly grounded in their individual times and places.
3. The structure of the novel is fresh, but not for novelty's sake. The overarching plot is as subtle and necessary as a pulse, and when I reached the end, I immediately went back to the beginning.

The River's Memory has the scope and depth of a spring-fed river's witnessing of climate, geology, and culture. It's where people harvest clay, food, each other. Where people make art, trades, civilizations. Where people find themselves.

[Nitya · Rating 5 out of 5]

The River's Memory is a collection of stories that take place along the same unnamed river in north Florida. Each story, or chapter, is narrated by a main female character. I was hooked in the first chapter, in which a native American potter's story unfolds. The potter is a master; she gathers clay from the river and has learned how to mix it and fire it so it does exactly as she wishes. Because of her artistry (and partly because of her lineage), she wields power among her people. She is also mentally ill and has periods of madness.
The book progresses forward through time, and each story flows easily into the next, until by the end we have returned to the beginnings of human life along the river, some 10,000 years ago.
Among the other characters whose voices we hear are a little girl whose mother suffers from depression over the death of a child, a young transgendered person born without legs in the early part of the 1900's who learns to swim by watching and swimming with the manatees. Another voice is a young woman at the Florida Industrial School for Girls near Ocala in 1918.
You would think that it is disconcerting to go from one time period and one main character to another entirely different time and person, but it wasn't. Much as I was totally engrossed in one narrator, the ending of their story and the beginning of the next did not feel jarring or unnatural.
I live in the area described so vividly in this book, so I am biased perhaps towards books which speak of the inherent and unique landscape which I call home. Alligators, cattails, cypress knees,Spanish moss, cold water so clear you can see through to the bottom far below; these are just part of what the author uses in her stories. Lambert's knowledge and love of her river and the lands around it is apparent in her articulate details.
I more or less devoured this book, and I will have to give more time to my thoughts on what the narrators shared in common with each other. That each girl, or woman had hope, and longing, and courage is evident. I won't say any more as I need time to digest this wonderful book.

[Elizabeth McCulloch · Rating 5 out of 5]

The River’s Memory, a novel by Sandra Gail Lambert, not only rewarded my careful reading, but made me want to read it twice. It tells the separate stories of six women and one little girl who lived along the Silver River in north central Florida. Lambert writes as though she were possessed by her seven characters. She lives in their worlds, sees their visions, and dreams their dreams.  Each character becomes real, with her own distinctive voice. Because Lambert inhabits their lives, we do too, and care desperately about the fate of these women, all but one long gone.

TO READ MY FULL (ILLUSTRATED!) REVIEW, GO TO https://thefeministgrandma.typepad.co...

[Sally Bellerose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clear-eyed - fierce and tender - a great read - the characters and their relationships with the "natural" world truly amaze

[Elizabeth Mcculloch · Rating 5 out of 5]

FOR AN ILLUSTRATED VERSION OF THIS REVIEW WITH REALLY GORGEOUS PHOTOS, GO TO http://thefeministgrandma.typepad.com/

I have a bad habit of gobbling books, racing through them to see what happens next. (This is similar to the way I often eat.) But sometimes a really fine book will slow me down. It’s partly a matter of vivid, melodious writing, with every word the right one and no words to spare. It makes me want to savor the sentences. And if the characters move me, the stories are page-turners, and it’s filled with delicious details, why wouldn’t I want to linger at the table?

The River’s Memory, a novel by Sandra Gail Lambert, not only rewarded my careful reading, but made me want to read it twice. It tells the separate stories of six women and one little girl who lived along the Silver River in north central Florida. Lambert writes as though she were possessed by her seven characters. She lives in their worlds, sees their visions, and dreams their dreams. Each character becomes real, with her own distinctive voice. Because Lambert inhabits their lives, we do too, and care desperately about the fate of these women, all but one long gone.

All the characters are intimately connected to the river, and to wild nature. They are solitary, sometimes lonely - though some have lovers, their lives are centered in nature, work, their creative vision, or simply survival. Their stories give us the history of Florida from prehistoric times into the 21st century: the extinction of species, indigenous trade before the European invasion, lynchings, the first world war and the flu epidemic, and the tacky tourism overlay which, for so many people, represents Florida. Artifacts from one story - a pot shard, a dugout canoe, a shred of scarf, a silver hip flask, appear in the stories that follow.

In the 16th century a Native American potter finds her clay and her inspiration in the river. Surrounded by enemies and treachery, brought down by illness, she holds onto her creative vision - all that matters is the clay, the next pot. From one enemy she hears rumors of invaders from across the sea:“...Men furred like animals, too many to count, who rode on top of beasts....they say that the hair dangled off their faces like moss and some of their chests shone like the sun. Weapons bounced off of them.”

Just before the Civil War, a little girl on the Florida frontier has the woods and the river for her playground. “I poke the caterpillar. The yellow horns pop out of its back. From this close, I can see the slime. I touch them and wipe my finger on the hem of my over slip, and it stains, but maybe Mother won’t see. The horns flop and suck back under the skin. I poke it again, and the horns do it again. They look the same yellow as what ran out of the sore on Sister’s leg....Now I see all the other caterpillars... I pull at one and its feet suck onto the leaves. I pull harder, and it keeps eating even with the back half of its body in the air....”

“Mist is lace on top of the water. A little more day and it’ll disappear. Sister and I wave our hands into the white, and it spins into the sky like smoke. I lean beside Sister and we reach our hands until they touch the water and make circles in our reflections.”

It is 1918, the height of the War and the flu epidemic. We are at the Florida Industrial School for Girls, where inmates labor in the kitchen. With contagion spreading through the school, an orphan girl runs away, looking for her grandparents’ old home. She finds it abandoned and in ruins. She grieves and remembers, and her pain - aching head and bones, charred throat, itchy skin - seems to be one with her grief.

During the Depression, a woman born with no legs, who walks on her hands, finds her freedom rowing and swimming in the river at night, communing with the manatees. She eases her constant pain with rum. Her parents have done their best to give her privacy and independence, while keeping her at home. They have built her a downstairs suite with a separate entrance. “But I don’t need a room of my own. I need the rest of the world.”

Boys who spot her in the river surround and torment her like mosquitoes. “The line of them have unbuttoned their pants. They waggle small penises and laugh. I’m on my second generation of little boys. It seems that any of their parents who remember I’m a woman haven’t told them. No one’s yelling Mockie or Jew boy, so this particular batch doesn’t know about that either.”

The end of the 20th century, and an old woman in a hospital. As she lies dying, her pain eased and tongue loosened by ample doses of painkilling drugs, she tells her memories to a prim lady from the local Historical Society.

Her lover - a 65-year-old woman with “sparkles of red” in her silver hair,“my gal”- comes to take her home, but she demands to be taken to the river instead. There she lies among pillows in an abandoned canoe, while her lover poles them down the river.

“Arrowhead stalks stretch up my spine and bloom their white flowers into my breasts.... A turtle swims away from us, the flip of her turtle feet a tickle along my ribs, and an alligator splashes off the sunny bank...I see the alligator’s old relative, the crocodile, blinking its transparent eyelids and swimming in the ancient ocean that existed here above us all.”

The sour salesclerk in the Silver Springs souvenir shop has worked there for thirty years. She observes the tourists buying tchotckes with grim amusement. “My ex-mother-in-law collected owls. I guess she still does. I guess women have to collect something so their families will know what to buy them for gifts.”

She’s been doing the job for thirty years, and now has to deal with her first “younger-than-I-am boss.” When she is fired, she runs from the security guards and climbs the fence to the river, where she is caught in a fierce winter storm.

10,000 years ago, when giant sloths still loomed twenty feet above the native hunters, and saber tooth tigers were not quite extinct, a woman travels the coast to trade with the river people on behalf of her tribe. “These people who live so far from the sea, they pack together, and they stink - of the sticky pine in their fires, the sour bark drink they make, the rock dust that floats from their chert quarry...” Lambert fully imagines the life of these prehistoric people - their tense negotiations in trade, their intimate knowledge of the natural world, the children who remain unnamed until they have survived the hazards of early childhood.

This is a book of the body, of the senses. Sights, sounds, smells, touch lead through memory to revelation or understanding. It is a book of close description, but not the sort that makes your eyes glaze over, waiting for something to for godsake happen. Each story is filled with suspense, often with violence, threat, and tragedy. And the details are so telling - funny, poignant, or heartbreaking.

The River's Memory is a feast. Don't gobble it down; savor it.

[Libby · Rating 5 out of 5]

I often say that Thomas Hardy couldn't be published now, based on his pages-long descriptions of the countryside where his novels are set. Well here's a novel that explores the flora and fauna from minute (dragonflies) to massive (a cypress tree so wide that when a character lies across it, she is only a radius). Really a series of interconnected stories, the unifying character is a river. Many of the characters could be considered "bad girls" and some are on the run. The stories are from 10,000 years ago, and the 16th, 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. When a character in the 21st century finds bones and pottery, we know where the bones and potsherds come from. Throughout we are immersed in the wetlands, prairies, and rivers of central Florida. Readers will learn about a Florida that most people don't know about.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was remiss in reviewing this when I first read it, and I'm making up for that now that I've just reread it on the anniversary of its publication.
I LOVE THIS BOOK! (I also love this author, but I loved the book first.)
This is a tour de force of lyricism and writing about women's embodied experiences in a visceral, deep-muscle kind of way. The braided narrative weaves us in and out of time without ever losing us, and the beauty of the language kept me spellbound on both my first and second reading. I cannot recommend this highly enough.

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a wonderful book! I met the author at a writer's residency and heard some of the material being workshopped. Sandra has a concrete earthiness that ties the separate threads of these women's stories across time to the land, and most of all the water, in a Florida far different than the one tourists mostly encounter. Each character has a vivid voice and draws you immediately deeply into a unique life.

[Baxter Clare Trautman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an outstanding collection of stories, connected chronologically and by the silvery, meandering thread of the Ocklawaha River. I checked almost all the books in the GR shelves category because this book is so many things - each story is darkly inspiring, historic, centered around a woman drawn to the beauty and mysteries of the river. I stopped short of checking the poetry box, but Lambert's writing reads like a flowing poem.

[Robert Yune · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lots of neat imagery and a wide historical scope. The stories are vaguely interconnected and tell the stories of women who interact with a Florida river in different (and often unexpected) ways. Read if you like strong imagery and history.

[Shereen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved the book. Descriptions made me feel like I was there with characters. Received the book for free through Goodreads First Reads

[Story Circle Book Reviews · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like a persimmon or a cucumber left on the vine too long, this book is both nourishing and bitter. Lambert writes gorgeous prose. I read this book on the flow of those words and those images alone. The texture between her voices is superb. But I had a difficult time becoming engaged with the book and did not feel invited to be part of the stories until Half Boy, page 105. In some ways, I think this book was ambitious, almost to a fault.

The stories within this novel are sad and hard and brutal and frightening, and they are written in a way that erases boundaries of race and sexuality, so that they become human stories. This element of Lambert's writing made me continue to read. When I began the story of a woman born without legs who learns to swim from the manatees and then wraps her breasts to appear as a man, who drinks rum from a jar at night, but must behave as a lady at the table with her parents in the morning—this story made me go back and revisit some of the earlier parts of the book with fresh and more eager eyes. I was willing, then, to be confused and disoriented. To be charmed and swept along. To feel both the emotion of the writing and the powerlessness of the characters.

The river weaves the stories together but Lambert doesn't always allow the reader to become part of the flow. While I rarely want an author to spoon-feed me, I did feel that Lambert could have left better clues or shadows or crumbs to lead us along on the journey she intended.

This is beautiful writing, and there is gold to be dug. A reader with patience and a heart for seeing this beauty will be rewarded.

by Amy Hale Auker
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

[Darlyn Kuhn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sandra Gail Lambert’s fiction and memoir have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies including New Letters, The Weekly Rumpus, Arts & Letters and The North American Review. Excerpts of this, her debut novel, have won prizes from Big Fiction Magazine and the Saints and Sinners Short Fiction Contest. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, a home base for kayak trips to her beloved rivers and coastal marshes.

In The River’s Memory, a woman born without legs spends her days swimming with manatees. Two artists, separated by centuries, guide each other’s hands. And a child of the Florida frontier sits on the graves of her siblings to think about race relations and the habits of caterpillars. These are some of the women who live along the banks of a river where water billows from caverns of silent lakes. None of them are famous. None have children. Instead, their stories exist in a mosaic of time and shadowed history, and the things of the river—clay and water, trees and bone—carry their memories forward.

[Jenny Yates · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful, poetic book, and I highly recommend it. It’s a collection of short stories woven around a river in Florida. These stories take their time, each one setting the scene in a particular era, starting in 1528 and ending in 2008. After this, it returns to the distant past, and the last story is set ten thousand years ago. The first and last stories are joined by the potter’s clay that comes from the river.

The characters are unique and compelling, and they are given plenty of time to tell their stories. One swims with the manatees, one takes shelter in an empty tree in a rainstorm, one runs away from a correctional home for girls, and one little one plays by the graves of her sisters. At one point or another, each immerses herself in water, and there are some that don’t survive this immersion.

[Candace Colt · Rating 5 out of 5]

A most remarkable book. First off, the writer has created a fabulous world and uses every word-hue imaginable to describe it. You are drawn in from the first story to the ending. She's written this in first person and in some books one POV is often so limiting. But not in Lambert's capable hands. Each story and each protagonist--BTW each is a female--comes alive. I'm a sprint reader and the way this is organized and presented makes it perfect for someone like me. You can read one of the short stories in one setting easily, then jump right into the next when you can. This is a book I'll read again and again. There are so many layers in the tapestry of her writing that it takes several times to appreciate all of it. And you won't see a river the same way again. I promise.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is billed as a novel, but I see it as a collection of linked short stories that all take place at the same river in Florida. The stories take place at different points in time, but all feature female protagonists who do not fit in and are drawn to the river. We’ve got a Native American potter, a woman born with no legs, a girl who struggles to understand pre-Civil War race relations, a dying lesbian telling the story of her life, and others. I like some of the stories better than others and sometimes struggle to figure out exactly what’s going on, but the language and the setting are beautiful and the stories unique.

[Angie · Rating 5 out of 5]

And engrossing world that transcends time, culture, race, sexuality and ability ... I was transported into the lyrical, sometimes-surreal, but always authentically felt physical and emotional landscape that Sandra Lambert created.

[Bettycindy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very well written. I could take it as one short story at a time, I guess. As a collection it is way too depressing for me. Alot of crazy and damaged people and they all die.

[Madeline Davidson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is filled with beautiful sensory accounts of nature along a river in Florida. Each chapter covers a different time period and has rich, well researched historical context. I feel like I know each character and that I am living on that River through time. Each woman creates a snapshot of the time period portrayed and the fabric of life along the river. Sandra Lambert’s descriptions wind the river through my mind.

[Pam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Local author. Locations known to north central Florida with the river being a central part of each story told.

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm sure someone will like this book - someone has, but I don't like short stories and the only reason I even started it was because it was a book club selection. I do admit it is a unique format of stories over the years from women at the same place on the map, just a different place in time.