THE GIRL FROM THE RIVER
FIRST EDITIONS ON SALE
SECOND EDITION COMING IN 2023
About the book:
Physics in the twenty-first century is not for the faint-hearted. Just ask Catherine Langley, twenty-three-year-old music major at UCLA, who stops by the flooded San Gabriel River on a stormy spring evening to help search for a dog that has fallen into the turbulent water and comes face to face with the protagonist of her mother's most famous novel-a ghostly girl who transcends the boundaries of space and time in the fiction, emerging from the river in the flesh, holding the lost Border collie.
The young women forge a fragile bond, but dimensions collide when the river-girl insists an amnesiac man found that winter in the Los Angeles riverbed with a torn driver's license from 1983 is her lover from the novel and also is drawn to Catherine's poet father, who bears an uncanny resemblance to an English horseman she loved in Africa in the sixteenth century.
Lives are shaken by a woodwind scholar from Tanzania, Dr. William Halliday, who has lost his wife and infant daughter and has recently taken a position at the university; Catherine's father suffering bouts of malaria; his horse infected by an ancient sword wound; a physics teacher obsessed with Quantum Theory; a psychotic nurse at the Medical Center; a gay dad who believes the river-girl's story, and his partner, an FBI agent investigating a connected abduction, who tries to disprove the girl's claims; a child mauled by an African lion; and the presence of a Spanish slaver from Portuguese East Africa.
Physics in the twenty-first century is not for the faint-hearted. Just ask Catherine Langley, twenty-three-year-old music major at UCLA, who stops by the flooded San Gabriel River on a stormy spring evening to help search for a dog that has fallen into the turbulent water and comes face to face with the protagonist of her mother's most famous novel-a ghostly girl who transcends the boundaries of space and time in the fiction, emerging from the river in the flesh, holding the lost Border collie.
The young women forge a fragile bond, but dimensions collide when the river-girl insists an amnesiac man found that winter in the Los Angeles riverbed with a torn driver's license from 1983 is her lover from the novel and also is drawn to Catherine's poet father, who bears an uncanny resemblance to an English horseman she loved in Africa in the sixteenth century.
Lives are shaken by a woodwind scholar from Tanzania, Dr. William Halliday, who has lost his wife and infant daughter and has recently taken a position at the university; Catherine's father suffering bouts of malaria; his horse infected by an ancient sword wound; a physics teacher obsessed with Quantum Theory; a psychotic nurse at the Medical Center; a gay dad who believes the river-girl's story, and his partner, an FBI agent investigating a connected abduction, who tries to disprove the girl's claims; a child mauled by an African lion; and the presence of a Spanish slaver from Portuguese East Africa.
PRAISE FOR THE GIRL FROM THE RIVER…
“Once, I was a swimmer with a few hard experiences in the water. I was drawn into this story in part because of what I’ve learned practically and metaphorically about water, and because the characters are believable and their lines are strong. There are no giveaways here.”
– T. Clark
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“A quantum possibility and a young woman’s reality collide in this gripping tale. When an author’s daughter forms a relationship with a fictional character from one of her mother’s novels, it soon becomes apparent that their connections, separated by generations, run much deeper than anyone could have imagined. The Girl From the River is a tantalizing story that dives headfirst into the inter-dimensional realm.”
– Ted D. Berner, author of Proof the Novel
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“The descriptions in this fiction are so vivid I was transported into them: intriguing flute performances, sensitive treatment of race, religion and partner preference, and the possibility of quantum connections between distant geographies and centuries. As the characters worked through these challenges, I felt a yearning to be better myself.”
– Scott B. Jensen