The River Wife by Jonis Agee

The River Wife by Jonis Agee

Agee writes of a generation of families living on the banks of the Missouri River in Missouri, beginning in the 1850s and spanning to the 1930s. The constant thread running through this story is the patriarch, Jacques Ducharme, a French fur trapper, who rescues the first Mrs. Ducharme from a terrible earthquake, where her family has abandoned her, crushed by a mighty house beam. The choices that Ducharme makes, the way he chooses to live his life, causes repurcussions through all the following generations.

I really enjoyed this book. Maybe because I spent five years living in Missouri, I don't know. The history of this region, especially regarding the Civil War, is sadly lacking in the Virginia public schools. Of course, we have so much history here to get through, that that may explain it. At any rate, I have read several books lately on Missouri and the Civil War, and those, together with the Devarry books (below) have really gotten me thinking a lot about war, notions of war, peoples attitudes when the country is at war, the feelings of innocents when they are caught up in war, and so on, all relevant, of course, to our own situation today, but also, of course, vastly different from the apparent indifference most of my countrymen seem to fee. I know that it's not that we don't care. I think really we just can't possibly fathom what's going on. Maybe that's why I love literature so much -- it creates experiences that we can not possibly have otherwise, and creates empathy or certainly more fully develops it, when it might not otherwise have been fully flowing.


I thoroughly enjoyed Agee's book, The River Wife. If you are interested in reading about Missouri and the period of time spanning the 1850s to the 1920s, and if you like horses and human drama, this is a great book.

Genre: Historical Fiction

Rating: ****