Once Upon A River

        Of my three outside reading books this semester, my favorite was Once Upon A River. It wasn’t because I necessarily connected with the main character, but I just found it really interesting to read and learn about her life. She had so many bad things happen to her, things that I could never imagine enduring, and she just kept on surviving.

            Since my topic for my project was family, I thought her story provided a really good insight into what I wanted to learn more about. Even though she had no family to take care of her by the end of the book, she took what she learned from them to be able to take care of herself. The one person in her family that I could not understand why she acted the way she did was her mother. Her mother abandoned her and then chose her new husband over her daughter. I see how the author could want to portray the mother as just a purely selfish person, but I didn’t see that as very realistic based on the back-story.

            I thought that not only did this book deal with family issues; it also dealt with some women’s rights issues. The book gave an overall message that you shouldn’t have to depend on someone, just because you’re a girl. This ties back to the main character’s issue with her mother because this is something her mother did.