Skip to main content
Customer Review
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 May 2024
The story starts in rural Colorado before WWII in a peach-farming family whose equilibrium is derailed by a mother’s death and the crippling of an uncle. The girl child, Victoria, has no template for love or softness. All is duty, work, endurance alongside a grieving father and wild younger brother. Then one day she walks into town and her eyes meet those of a young man and their souls instantly connect. They fall in love against the social rules of the time - for Wilson Moon is a despised descendant of the indigenous peoples of America. Victoria’s troubled and jealous brother, Seth, becomes an accomplice in Wil Moon’s eventual gruesome murder, an act that tears this family apart.
Victoria is already carrying their love child and to avoid discovery she heads into the wilderness, to a hunting shelter high in the mountains where she and Wil found the physical expression of their love. Survival there alone is hard and after she gives birth, alone, after a difficult labour, having to resuscitate her blue baby. Before long, Victoria cannot avoid the truth: she is starving and her milk has dried up and she must act to save her baby’s life. She stumbles across a picnic site where a husband, wife and their newborn son are resting, surreptitiously leaving her own baby in their vehicle in hope the other mother will save him, nourish him and love him.
Two decades go by. Victoria remains alone, has transplanted her family farm’s peach trees to a new location, their old home and neighbouring town drowned by a dam but each year she returns to the picnic spot where she gave up her baby to place a stone atop a boulder where the ‘other’ mother had left behind a peach, rightly assuming the ‘forest mother’ was likely also in need of nourishment. On what is intended to be her final visit there, Victoria finds on the boulder, secured by a rock, the ‘other’ mother’s story, an account which offers a path to reconnection and redemption.
Written in Victoria’s untutored but compelling voice, this is an account of a woman who stands for all women, a life against the odds, subject to forces beyond control. But it is also a story of love and hope, of how all humans learn to accept that life flows like a river, eternally moving onwards, sometimes in flood, sometimes not, bringing joy and sorrow in equal measure. Like Victoria, we must snatch happy moments when and where we can, grieve for the losses and defeats, and somehow summon the courage and resilience to rise, fall, rise again and keep going.
Victoria is already carrying their love child and to avoid discovery she heads into the wilderness, to a hunting shelter high in the mountains where she and Wil found the physical expression of their love. Survival there alone is hard and after she gives birth, alone, after a difficult labour, having to resuscitate her blue baby. Before long, Victoria cannot avoid the truth: she is starving and her milk has dried up and she must act to save her baby’s life. She stumbles across a picnic site where a husband, wife and their newborn son are resting, surreptitiously leaving her own baby in their vehicle in hope the other mother will save him, nourish him and love him.
Two decades go by. Victoria remains alone, has transplanted her family farm’s peach trees to a new location, their old home and neighbouring town drowned by a dam but each year she returns to the picnic spot where she gave up her baby to place a stone atop a boulder where the ‘other’ mother had left behind a peach, rightly assuming the ‘forest mother’ was likely also in need of nourishment. On what is intended to be her final visit there, Victoria finds on the boulder, secured by a rock, the ‘other’ mother’s story, an account which offers a path to reconnection and redemption.
Written in Victoria’s untutored but compelling voice, this is an account of a woman who stands for all women, a life against the odds, subject to forces beyond control. But it is also a story of love and hope, of how all humans learn to accept that life flows like a river, eternally moving onwards, sometimes in flood, sometimes not, bringing joy and sorrow in equal measure. Like Victoria, we must snatch happy moments when and where we can, grieve for the losses and defeats, and somehow summon the courage and resilience to rise, fall, rise again and keep going.
