Two Rivers

Rating:
Summary: A Southern Heroine with Universal Appeal
Review: Naomi Williams' novel is a finely crafted piece that expresses all the rich heritage of Southern fiction through the person of a female protagonist that speaks to a universal audience. The novel's protagonist, Liza, will captivate all those who have ever felt constrained by society through her deeply rooted desire to breech boundaries imposed on her from without, and the novel's other characters wrap Liza in a rich quilt of human responses to her passionate personality that will speak to all readers, regardless of their age or their background. Williams' profound style evokes character and place so that we can almost smell the thick Lowcountry mud that borders the banks of the "Two Rivers" that shape Liza's life.

Rating:
Summary: A Southern Heroine with Universal Appeal
Review: Naomi Williams' novel is a finely crafted piece that expresses all the rich heritage of Southern fiction through the person of a female protagonist that speaks to a universal audience. The novel's protagonist, Liza, will captivate all those who have ever felt constrained by society through her deeply rooted desire to breech boundaries imposed on her from without, and the novel's other characters wrap Liza in a rich quilt of human responses to her passionate personality that will speak to all readers, regardless of their age or their background. Williams' profound style evokes character and place so that we can almost smell the thick Lowcountry mud that borders the banks of the "Two Rivers" that shape Liza's life.

Rating:
Summary: An Eloquent and Enduring Journey
Review: Naomi Williams's first journey into published prose explodes in the first description of the South Carolina lowcountry she has committed to memory and experience. As Williams's young protagonist, Liza Marion Brown, searches feverishly for a violet among the daisies, we are seduced into her lifelong quest for color in an insular world of bland expectations and bleak hopes. Clinging to her mother's legacy of butterbeans and Paul Scarlet roses, Liza uses the past to secure a future of dreams hard-fought, but realized. This imaginative, resourceful protagonist will seduce you down her river and into her heart, revealing family secrets, shattering expectations, and renewing your faith in the endurance and intelligence of the individual. If you live north of the Mason-Dixon line, you need to embrace this new emblem of Southern feminism and lay to rest the beleaguered and banal Scarlett as your symbol of all this region epitomizes. Two Rivers is not only an eye-opener -- it is the breath and soul of the human journey.