The river knows your name by Kelly Mustian

Release date: 04-01-25

Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher: Tantor Media

Narrator: Lisa Larsen

Categories: Literature & Fiction

Received from Tantor

The book takes place in the 30s and 70s. The dual timeline worked well.

In the 70s we have Nell starting to wonder what really happened back in the 30s. Suddenly she had a sister from nowhere and they moved around a lot. What did her mother Hazel hide?

In the 30s we have a young mother struggling to make a good life for her and her daughter. This part was sadder. She tried so hard, but it is in the middle of the great depression.

It takes a long time for all the pieces to come together. Nell does a lot of investigation, but the past has its secrets.

It made me so angry at times. How can people be so cruel!? It moved me.

A good book that had me wondering through out what was going on.

Good narration. It feels like I have listened to her before, because her voice was familiar. Anyway, she did well with voices and brought true emotion into the story

For nearly thirty years, Nell has kept a childhood promise to never reveal what she and Evie found tucked inside a copy of Jane Eyre in their mother's bookcase—a record of Evie's birth naming a stranger as her mother. But lately, Nell has been haunted by hazy memories of their early life in Mississippi, years their reclusive mother, Hazel, has kept shrouded in secrecy. Evie recalls nothing before their house on Clay Mountain in North Carolina, but Nell remembers abrupt moves, odd accommodations, and the rainy night a man in a dark coat and a hat pulled low climbed their porch steps with a very little girl—Evie—then left without her.

In dual storylines, Nell, forty-two in 1971, reaches into the past to uncover dangerous, long-buried secrets, and Becca, a young mother in the early 1930s, presses ahead, each moving toward 1934, the catastrophic year that would forever link them.

From a windswept ghost town long forgotten, to a river house in notorious Natchez Under-the-Hill, to a moody nightclub stage, Evie's other mother emerges from the shadows of Depression-era Mississippi in a story of hardship and perseverance, of betrayal and trust, and of unexpected redemption in a world in which the lines between heroes and culprits are not always clearly drawn.