Review: A 4 Star Review
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 31, 2013
Before I begin this review, I want to apologize for being so late in reviewing this book. I finished reading it at the beginning of May...but due to moving, changing jobs and a whole mess of other factors...it took me nearly an entire month to sit down to write a review.I enjoyed The Banks of Certain Rivers immensely. I always get a little nervous about reading books primarily to write a review...there's always that nag in the back of my head wondering if the book will be completely horrendous and how I will manage to not only read the entire book but then write a decent review that's not totally scathing. Thankfully not once did a scathing comment come to my mind after reading this novel. In fact. the only thing I thought of once I got to the end was...darn, I wish there was more.Harrison is a descriptive writer, and there were quite a few passages throughout the book that I wanted to read over and over again...or after a particularly beautiful passage on running, I wanted to lace up my sneakers and go for a run."I start to run, and my nose fills with the smell of rain and wet earth. I run along the shoulder of the highway in an easy rhythm, and the rain gathers up on my forehead and eyebrows; it flows down my face, it drips from the tip of my nose. There is wet dirt, a puddle in the gravel, new grass pushing through old in the ditch. Violets grow along the edge of the road. To my right, the Little Jib River flows brown and swollen to the lake. The water moves ceaselessly, and I move along with it. To my left, across the road, the rain strips wilted cherry blossoms from the rows and rows of trees, and drops them to the ground."The only minor fault that I could find in this book was that I felt as though the two major conflicts of the book were resolved too fast. There was such a buildup to them and it almost seemed as though there would be no resolution...then everything was cleaned up in a few pages. It wasn't exactly a let down but I did kind of get that feeling that you get when you perceive a problem much worse then it really is and when you realize it...you wonder why you used so much energy worrying about it.After reading The Banks of Certain Rivers, Jon Harrison is definitely going on my authors to keep track of file...so he better get writing!