"Campbell has a ruthless and precise eye for the details of the physical world…An excellent American parable about the consequences of our favorite ideal, freedom."

"With all the fixings of a Johnny Cash song—love, loss, redemption—Campbell captures these Michiganders and their earthy, brutal paradise in tales rich with insight and well worth the trip."

"The wonder of Once Upon a River is how fresh and weathered it seems at the same time…Bonnie Jo Campbell has built her new novel like a modern-day craftsman from the old timbers of our national myths about loners living off the land, rugged tales as perilous as they are alluring. Without sacrificing any of its originality, this story comes bearing the saw marks of classic American literature, the rough-hewn sister of The Leatherstocking Tales, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Walden…Margo’s hushed voice is so pure, her spirit so indomitable, that you’ll yearn for her to find the freedom she craves."

"This is a splendid story of survival in extremis, with a searingly original heroine."

"American fiction waited a long time for Bonnie Jo Campbell to come along. A lot of us, not only women, were looking for a fictional heroine who would be deeply good, brave as a wolverine, never a cry baby, as able as Sacagawea, with a strong and unapologetic sexuality. We wanted to feel her roots in some ancient story, we wanted Diana the huntress, but not her virginity; we wanted a real human girl who we could believe had been suckled by bears, or wolves. To give us heroines like this, the god finally brought us Bonnie Jo Campbell, one of our most important and necessary writers, and Margo Crane, the central character of Once Upon A River, an outcast, feral beauty who can shoot like Annie Oakley, is her most poignant and mythic creation so far."

"Keenly observed and described with a tender regard reminiscent of the best of Berry or Stegner."

"Margo’s struggle to survive proves irresistible, like the tug of the Stark [River] itself."

"...the book is a violent but inspiring tale packed with colorful river dwellers, a working-class community of power company and metal workers, farmers, hunters and housewives....Campbell has created a character with an iron gut and a heart to match, recalling powerful heroines like Clara of Joyce Carol Oates' A Garden of Earthly Delights and Ree of Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone."

"Mark Twain owns America's rivers, and writers who venture out on those waters are obliged to acknowledge his dominion. Bonnie Jo Campbell's tough and confident Once Upon a River, about a runaway teenager on Michigan's waterways, pays due homage to the bard of the Mississippi, but the novel also tells its own captivating story"

"Campbell’s sensuous prose vividly evokes the natural world and brings us inside Margo’s experience of it."

"Starred Review. A dramatic and rhapsodic American odyssey. A female Huckleberry Finn. A wild-child-to-caring-woman story as intricately meshed with the natural life of the river as a myth. …she conveys all that Margo does, thinks, and feels with transfixing sensuous precision, from the jolt of a gun to the muscle burn of rowing a boat against the current to the weight of a man. From killing and skinning game to falling in with outlaws and finding refuge with kind if irascible strangers, Margo’s earthy education and the profound complexities of her timeless dilemmas are exquisitely rendered and mesmerizingly suspenseful. A glorious novel destined to entrance and provoke."

"Campbell is a bard, a full-throated singer whose melodies are odes to farms and water and livestock and fishing rods and rifles, and to hardworking folks who know the value of life as well as the randomness of life's troubles."

"With all the fixings of a Johnny Cash song—love, loss, redemption—Campbell captures these Michiganders and their earthy, brutal paradise in tales rich with insight and well worth the trip."

"With this book, Campbell has delivered a gripping story confirming her status as one of the most distinctive storytellers of her generation."

"Whether upstream or downstream, Campbell's full-blooded young heroine wants to make her own way…By novel’s end, [Margo] emerges as one of the most realistic underage runaways in modern fiction—part Huck Finn, part Annie Oakley, and always herself."

"It is, rather, an excellent American parable about the consequences of our favorite ideal, freedom."

"An extended slice of life. That’s the key to Campbell’s stories, which eschew easy summaries, easy conclusions, and are all the more astonishing for doing so."

Narrator Susan Bennett’s voice—intimate, pensive, and, at times, tentative—seems a perfect fit for the character of young Margo Crane. The quiet and somber Margo comes of age in Campbell’s imaginative story of an awkward teenager who, after the violent death of her father, travels the Stark River in Michigan in search of her absent mother. Margo encounters an eclectic assortment of personalities that range from the rough and earthy to the eccentric and odd. Disappointingly, Campbell’s rich characters demand more variety, texture, and individuality from Bennett’s voice than she gives. They all sound much like Margo herself. But the author’s strong writing will still carry the listener along the twists and turns of this memorable tale. S.K.G. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine