WHERE THE FOREST MEETS THE RIVER explores the complex, interconnected lives of a small town’s residents

Recommended for fans of Elizabeth Strout, Richard Russo, and Anne Tyler

Where the Forest Meets the River

By Shannon Bowring

Europa Editions: September 3, 2024

336 pages, $18.00

Like Elizabeth Strout and Richard Russo, Shannon Bowring excels in bringing families and small towns to life in all their interconnected complexity. Her 2023 debut, The Road to Dalton, introduced readers to the tiny town in northern Maine that most people drive past in a matter of seconds. While to the outsider’s eye it may appear that nothing happens in Dalton, it is in fact a microcosm of the outside world, where seemingly everything happens. In The Road to Dalton, several lives were thrown off course – and then rebuilt – following a young wife’s suicide caused by undiagnosed post-partum depression.

Where the Forest Meets the River returns to Dalton five years later to follow the progress of these characters in the summer of 1995. Police officer Nate Theroux is raising daughter Sophie alone following his wife Bridget’s death. He has left the police department for the regular hours of a job as a kiln operator at the town’s mill. His mother Bev has also changed jobs for similar reasons; but more central to her life is her altered relationship with Trudy Haskell, Dalton’s opinionated librarian and Bev’s close friend for more than two decades. Their husbands accept their secret relationship with varying levels of understanding. To go public would only ruin four lives, and possibly more. Trudy’s husband Richard is the town doctor but has grown depressed, with serious health consequences. But spending more time together is an opportunity for Trudy and Richard to put their marriage on more solid footing.

Bev and her husband Bill, as well as Bridget’s father Marshall (the mill owner), are attentive grandparents to Sophie, but Bridget’s mother Annette has never recovered from her daughter’s death and rarely leaves the house. Rose, the mother of two young boys, has left the restaurant to work for Dr. Haskell. Her abusive drug dealer husband Tommy was run out of town in the first book, and she is holding things together as a single mom. You can probably predict where the two single parents will find solace and support, but it’s still a pleasure to watch it play out.

And then there’s Greg Fortin, the overweight high school student who stopped eating junk food and started running the summer before going away to the University of Maine but is still struggling with his sexuality and lack of social skills. In the first book, Trudy had taken him under her wing to help with her large garden, and to provide some sympathetic guidance, and he has developed a passion for horticulture. The hitch is that Greg’s dad has his heart set on him coming back after college to help him run the town’s hardware store and eventually take it over. But that’s not the life Greg wants.

That’s a lot of people and relationships to explore, but Bowring does a fine job of showing us their inner lives and the web of connections they share in this small town. She is a compassionate chronicler of the everyday lives and life-changing moments of her many characters; she gives each of them enough attention to ensure they are fully realized and sympathetic despite being complicated and occasionally difficult. Each of them eventually finds a path forward.

As in The Road to Dalton, I like and care about these people. Watching them find their way through the forest of their lives to reach the river that leads to better days made for an absorbing read. I hope they continue to manage life’s challenges in the coming years. Maybe a third book will provide the answers.