Product Description

From acclaimed novelist Jonis Agee, whom The New York Times Book Review called “a gifted poet of that dark lushness in the heart of the American landscape,” The River Wife is a sweeping, panoramic story that ranges from the New Madrid earthquake of 1811 through the Civil War to the bootlegging days of the 1930s.

When the earthquake brings Annie Lark’s Missouri house down on top of her, she finds herself pinned under the massive roof beam, facing certain death. Rescued by French fur trapper Jacques Ducharme, Annie learns to love the strong, brooding man and resolves to live out her days as his “River Wife.”

More than a century later, in 1930, Hedie Rails comes to Jacques’ Landing to marry Clement Ducharme, a direct descendant of the fur trapper and river pirate, and the young couple begin their life together in the very house Jacques built for Annie so long ago. When, night after late night, mysterious phone calls take Clement from their home, a pregnant Hedie finds comfort in Annie’s leather-bound journals. But as she reads of the sinister dealings and horrendous misunderstandings that spelled out tragedy for the rescued bride, Hedie fears that her own life is paralleling Annie’s, and that history is repeating itself with Jacques’ kin.

Among the family’s papers, Hedie encounters three other strong-willed women who helped shape Jacques Ducharme’s life–Omah, the freed slave who took her place beside him as a river raider; his second wife, Laura, who loved money more than the man she married; and Laura and Jacques’ daughter, Maddie, a fiery beauty with a nearly uncontrollable appetite for love. Their stories, together with Annie’s, weave a haunting tale of this mysterious, seductive, and ultimately dangerous man, a man whose hand stretched over generations of women at a bend in the river where fate and desire collide.

The River Wife richly evokes the nineteenth-century South at a time when lives changed with the turn of a card or the flash of a knife. Jonis Agee vividly portrays a lineage of love and heartbreak, passion and deceit, as each river wife comes to discover that blind devotion cannot keep the truth at bay, nor the past from haunting the present.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #45094 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-17
• Released on: 2007-07-17
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 416 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Agee (Sweet Eyes; Strange Angels) delivers an enthralling family saga set in Missouri's boot heel, a place so remote, "it's as if the whole state of Missouri has been trying to shake it off for years, like a vestigial tail." Seventeen-year-old Hedie Rails arrives in 1930 as the pregnant bride of Clement Ducharme at his family estate, but little does Hedie know that she's carrying on a tradition: in 1811, young Annie Lark is rescued from the Midwestern New Madrid earthquake by French fur trapper Jacques Ducharme and becomes the first "river wife." Hedie discovers this—along with the dark side of the Ducharme legacy—through old diaries she finds at the family home. She also learns of the other women involved with Jacques: Omah, the freed slave girl who joins him in river piracy, and Laura, his fortune-hunting second wife whose daughter, Maddie, is Clement's mother As Hedie's experiences become increasingly ominous (where does Clement go at night, and why does he come home beaten up? Are those footsteps she hears upstairs?), parallels develop between her life and those of past river wives. Lush historical detail, a plot brimming with danger, love and betrayal, and a magnificent cast (Jacques is larger than life, and the wives are sassy, sexed-up spitfires) will keep readers entranced. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by Jennifer Vanderbes

In the late 19th century, as the United States struggled to recover from the Civil War and the spiritualist movement reached its peak, the idea that a person could be haunted by the past moved beyond metaphor. Writers such as Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, Sarah Orne Jewett and Henry James introduced the supernatural into their work. No longer was the past conveyed in flashback and dialogue alone; the past became an actual woman in a blue or white dress, standing by a window, whispering about how she'd been wronged.

So it's in keeping with the spirit of that time that in Jonis Agee's The River Wife, set in 19th-century Missouri, a wronged woman haunts the story. This engaging novel traces the loves and losses of three generations of women, but Annie Lark is the book's spirit protagonist. In a riveting opening scene, an earthquake pins young Annie beneath a roof beam in her house, and, with the river rising, her family leaves her for dead. When French fur trapper Jacques Ducharme finally rescues her and nurses her back to health, they fall in love and marry. Jacques builds her a glorious house on the banks of the Mississippi, but soon he turns to violence and piracy and takes up with another woman. "The years passed, their love fading to gray ruin." When the river floods, Annie is trapped once again; but this time, Jacques fails to save her.

Interwoven with Annie's story is the tale of 17-year-old Hedie Rails, who in 1930 has just married Ducharme's great-grandson, Clement. Pregnant, Hedie is estranged from her family, living with Clement in the house where Jacques and Annie once lived. When a series of mysterious late-night phone calls draws Clement away, she begins to suspect him of adultery and thievery.

Separated by more than a century, Annie's and Hedie's stories bookend the struggles of three other women who lived in this house over the decades: Jacques's second wife, Laura; his daughter, Maddie; and a freed slave named Omah, who becomes his partner in piracy. All of these women battle life on the Mississippi: Fires and earthquakes and dogs and bandits wreak havoc on "Jacques' Landing." Even more so, they struggle against their roles as women. Endlessly weighing the physical and financial protection of men against their own independent urges (toward infidelity, lesbianism), these plucky women all strike perilous bargains with themselves.

Agee's world is not quite matriarchal -- bonds between mother and daughter are generally broken, and every woman's place in the novel is earned by her connection to Jacques -- but only women's stories are told. The novel refuses to look closely at Jacques. He is like the river itself, flowing through the narrative landscape, mysterious and powerful but, in the end, impenetrable.

While the men in the novel exert power visibly and forcefully -- they wield guns and knives, they travel freely -- the women generally do so quietly. They use potions and talismans, and they write. In 1930, Hedie finds Annie's notebook. "And so it was," says Hedie, "that the women of the old house on Jacques' Landing began to tell me their stories. . . . Sometimes I read the words they had written, sometimes they visited me in dreams; on many occasions they spoke outright, out loud to me." Jacques may outlive his wife, but she haunts the house for years, in words and in spirit.

The depiction of the struggle between the sexes is well done, but I wish it were more compact. The novel's broad temporal canvas becomes, at times, its weakness. By the introduction of the fourth Ducharme woman, what began as a subtle narrative echo becomes repetitive. And pivotal emotional moments -- such as falling in love -- are sometimes lost in the sprawl, compressed into short paragraphs that make characters' ecisions seem like contrivances. By the end, the revelation of each character's lineage and the knitting together of narrative strands distract from the novel's emotional and thematic weight.

With Annie metaphorically and literally haunting the novel, Agee seems to suggest that she cannot be silenced. Literary ghosts are almost always female, giving voice to those that the living world has rendered powerless. Just as the ghost in Toni Morrison's Beloved is an infant and the narrator of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones is a murdered girl, Annie, although twice abandoned, is given immortality.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Agee's long-awaited fifth novel is an all-consuming experience. From the moment Hedie Rails arrives in Jacques' Landing, Missouri, in 1930 as Clement Ducharme's young bride, readers are swept into a tale of passion, deceit, and misfortune steeped in the best southern gothic tradition. "This isn't a land to love, is it?" remarks Hedie about the unforgiving, table-flat Missouri Bootheel region, and she's right. As she reads the diaries of Annie Lark, crippled in the New Madrid earthquake of 1811 and rescued by French fur trapper Jacques Ducharme, Hedie learns about her new husband's disturbing family legacy. The enigmatic Jacques amasses a fortune as a Mississippi river pirate, and the quest for his illicit wealth preoccupies the women of later generations. These include Laura, an Irish adventuress who becomes Jacques' second wife; Omah, the freed slave who's his partner in crime; and Maddie, Laura's daughter. This mesmerizing saga teeming with memorable characters, sharp depictions of frontier life, and lucid, beautifully wrought prose will haunt readers long afterward. Sarah Johnson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

"There's just no way of knowing the infinite devices we have to stitch ourselves together across time."


Agee's fascinating story bridges the lives of two women over a century apart, Annie Lark Ducharme and Hedie Rails Ducharme. Annie is trapped in the earthquake of 1811, her family's cabin near the mighty Mississippi collapsing in the earth's sudden violence. Immobilized by a roof beam, Annie is left to die by her family, clinging to life day by day while in agonizing pain. When French trapper and river pirate, Jacques Ducharme, rescues the helpless girl, it is inevitable that she fall in love with this rough but tender man who wants only to protect her and build a home that will stand as a testament to them, Jacques Landing, a place of refuge for weary river travelers and traders. Annie becomes his "river wife", living rough until they return to the banks of the river and begin building Jacques' dream, Annie pregnant with their child. The building progresses against all odds, although Jacques and his cohorts revert to their piracy to find the means.

Despite her older husband's flaws, Annie is happy, reluctant to defy this man of such great ambition. Then a truly monstrous event destroys any forgiveness that exists between them, neither able to recapture their prior hopefulness. Though other Ducharme women people Jacques' life, including his second wife, Laura Burke Shut Ducharme, who gives an ageing man a new lease on life, none can replace his passion for Annie. In 1930, Hedie Rails Ducharme arrives, the naïve young bride of the older Clement Ducharme, returning with him to Jacques Landing where they act out the fate of a family blighted by tragedy and ill-starred relationships. Like Annie, Hedie is hopelessly in love; like Jacques, Clement lives outside the law, leaving his pregnant wife alone at night with the unfamiliar groaning of the house while he pursues whatever criminal enterprise draws him away night after night.

Hedie's only solace is in Annie's diaries, which she pours over through the long, dark hours waiting for Clement to return, aware only that she is connected to Annie and the other river wives who have been a part of the Ducharme legacy. Detailing the private hopes and sorrows of these women, from Annie, Laura, the enigmatic Omah, who learns the ways of piracy from Jacques himself, to Hedie, who will add her story to Annie's, this novel is rich in regional history. Agee's images rise from the past, the waiting, patient river, the aggressive, dangerous men, the Landing that draws all manner of traveler and the women who bring heart to a tale of tragedy and violence begun with Jacques and ending with Clement. The river runs in the blood of these men and the women seduced by their natural charm, even when that love is defeated by greed, ambition and disillusion. A powerful tale, here is the essence of the river, the country and the women blinded by their passions. Luan Gaines/ 2008.

A great summer read
This, grand, sweeping, epic novel makes for great summer reading. Full of cinematic scenes, this book is richly detailed and beautifully executed, beginning with a vivid evocation of the New Madrid earthquake, and including a violent attack by pirates of a merchant vessel on the Mississippi, a lushly romantic encounter between two women taking a cure at Hot Springs, ghostly visitations, and a harrowing barn fire. The many marriages of long-lived Jacques Ducharme and his descendants are an album of the types of love possible in relationships: passionate, devoted, protective, companionable, and enduring. Read this book!

Relentless and compelling as the Mississippi River itself
The past continually haunts the present in Jonis Agee's historical novel THE RIVER WIFE, the story of four generations of women whose lives are intertwined with charismatic, larger-than-life Jacques Ducharme.

The first woman to be introduced (but last chronologically) is Hedie Ducharme, a teenaged, pregnant bride who, in 1930, comes with her new husband Clement to live at his family's house in Missouri's far southeastern bootheel region. The house is known as Jacques' Landing. Estranged from her family, often left alone by her husband for days at a time, Hedie turns to the journals she finds in the house's library. In their pages, she discovers clues not only to Jacques, the house's namesake, but also to the several women whose lives were intertwined with his.

The first woman --- who stands at the spiritual and emotional heart of the novel --- is Annie Lark, who has been trapped in the wreckage of the devastating 1812 New Madrid Earthquake. Abandoned by her family, nearly dead of starvation and thirst, Annie embraces her savior and gladly joins him in a new kind of life on the fringes of society. When Jacques decides to settle down and build a house and an inn on land near the Mississippi, she gladly joins in his dreams of prosperity and wealth.

Crippled for life by her injuries, soon beset by a devastating personal tragedy and with a series of betrayals, Annie gradually grows disillusioned with Jacques and with their marriage. After her death, her ghostly presence seems to haunt the women who follow her --- including a former slave, as well as Jacques' conniving second wife and their daughter Maddie.

As Hedie reads these journals, Annie's presence also haunts her life 100 years later. Hedie's life, from her pregnancy to her relationship with Clement, seems to have precedents in the lives of those women who came to Jacques' Landing before her. Surrounded by mystery and violence, these women find solace and safety in small magic, charms and talismans that often reappear over and over again. Hedie reflects on these protective objects: "We have so little that isn't too fragile to bear our living."

The novel's Ozark setting, particularly the threat of earthquakes and the simultaneously benevolent and menacing presence of the Mississippi River, informs much of the action. Living on the fringes of society, Jacques and his women are freed to live an almost lawless existence, isolated from both progress and propriety. Southern Gothic elements are also at work in the novel, from supernatural sightings to grotesque violence to an almost suffocating atmosphere. Agee, for the most part, ties together the women's stories effectively, only occasionally bogging down in explanations of the tangled family tree. As a whole, though, the story of Jacques' women sweeps along as relentlessly and compellingly as the Mississippi River itself.

--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl