Sometimes a River Song by Avril Joy
Critics’ Reviews
An amazing, beautiful book with echoes of Eimear McBride. Avril Joy knows how to draw you into the story, right into the soul of the narrator. Aiyana’s voice is the voice of the river. I could have gone on listening to that song for ever.
— Kathleen Jones, author of A Passionate Sisterhood: The Sisters, Wives and Daughters of the Lake Poets
Original and beautiful. A tour de force. The narrator’s voice sings. I can almost hear the insects and the dip of the oars.
— Sharon Griffiths, journalist, author of The Accidental Time Traveller and The Lost Guide to Life and Love
A great feat of literary imagination which evokes the life of fifteen year old Aiyana, a daughter of Arkansas, living on the great river which saves her people from the deprivation of the dust bowl in 1930s America. Her voice haunts us and her spirit warms us as she weaves her own survival into a cloth where the weft is her determination to unchain herself from her illiteracy. Avril Joy infuses this original novel with an ensemble of highly evolved characters who add to a realistic evocation of the complex river community. This beautifully written novel will enchant readers, young and old, across the world.
— Wendy Robertson, author of The Long Journey Home and Writing at the Maison Bleue
There is a wonderful musicality to Aiyana’s voice as she talks of the moons and the river. I could feel the shift in the seasons as I was reading, so vivid is the prose here… A book about identity and secrets, I would not hesitate to recommend Sometimes a River Song; it is an original and compelling work.
— Kate Wilson, author
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The power in the novel comes from its use of language. Joy has convincingly caught the diction of the poor whites at that time and uses it in Aiyana’s narration so effectively that the reader feels almost at one with her… In Sometimes a River Song, Avril Joy has produced a work of haunting beauty which celebrates the courage and resilience of the human spirit.
— Jenny Gorrod, Dundee University Review of the Arts
I felt, by the end, that I had been reading an epic tale, not a novel – rhythmic, mystical, poetic.
— Alison Coles, BookOxygen
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A beautiful element of this novel is the subtle defiance of women. Whilst they struggle to create autonomy and freedom, the characters demonstrate how even in the most hopeless of times, women do not simply standby and let their selves be owned.
— Isabelle Coy-Dibley, The Contemporary Small Press
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One of the most moving books I’ve read in a long time… It reminded me initially of Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, mainly because the narrative voice of the girl is so distinctive and haunting.
— Kathleen Jones, author
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There is a wonderful musicality to Aiyana’s voice as she talks of the moons and the river. I could feel the shift in the seasons as I was reading, so vivid is the prose here…A book about identity and secrets, I would not hesitate to recommend Sometimes a River Song; it is an original and compelling work.
—Kate Wilson, author One Day Perhaps I’ll Know
Listen to Aiyana. Let her voice take hold of you, hypnotic and insistent as the river, as ‘the lull and rock of moving water’. Let her telling take you to the end of this, her own unanswerable story – unanswerable as truth is and as full of event as the river is ‘full of catfish and bream, turtle and gar’.
She’ll make you think, without trying to, about the way we treat the earth; about what’s wrong with it. She’ll make you think again as from the heart. She’ll make you think, perhaps, that poetry is something ordinary and rare as grandma ‘singing to the corn while she hoe’.
Listen to her.
—Gillian Allnutt, poet ‘How the Bicycle Shone’
Sometimes a River Song is a poignant, harrowing, tale of secrets, lies, scores to be settled, and the river in its moods and seasons. It is written in beautiful, fluid prose. I could hear Aiyana’s voice and longed for her to triumph.
—The Historical Review Society