Rating: 4.5/5 
Campbell’s debut novel Q Road follows offbeat half-native Rachel Crane as she stumbles into a marriage of convenience when her recluse mother goes on the lam after shooting a man dead for nosing around Rachel. Once Upon a River turns back the clock to the late ‘70s and focuses on the formative years of that recluse mother, Margo Crane, as she grows into a woman along riverbanks following abandonment by her own mother. We could call it a prequel if this novel didn’t so completely transcend such a trite categorization.
Margo flows by her own current. Growing up in rural Michigan, her idyllic childhood along the river — in which she swims with such abandon that “she swallowed minnows alive and felt the Stark River move inside her” — is shattered when her Uncle Cal drunkenly rapes her in a barn at the family Thanksgiving. Margo’s an avid poacher, at first for recreation, then for survival after her shooting the tip from her lecherous uncle’s penis leads to the shotgun retribution felled upon her cherished father.
She takes to the only home she has left, her inherited teak rowboat, and traverses the Stark with the initial intention of finding her long-lost mother, who couldn’t stomach the smell of the river or the way it turned all her leather apparel green with mildew. Launching into a protracted river odyssey, Margo makes strange bedfellows, at first out of necessity as she takes up with Brian, a bear of a man who offers more protection than Margo asks for, and then with Michael, a kind-hearted progressive living across the river who goes to “hippy church” every Sunday. And then there’s the erudite and nameless Native American (also Rachel’s father) whose kind-hearted but self-serving interest in Margo stems from his desire to taste the life of his indigenous ancestors while on a soul-searching sojourn.
Despite her relative lack of education, Margo’s no dummy. She reads often, treating her copy of an Annie Oakley biography with the reverence of scripture and justifying her survivalist existence through the mold forged by that famed trick shooter. And what’s more, Margo has seen nature’s curveballs; she’s witnessed a deer eating a bird and knows that a swallowed snake can escape back up a heron’s throat.
Campbell makes the wise choice to present the story in third person, while keeping the reader heartrendingly close to Margo’s point of view. This allows lyrical flourishes, while still capturing the vulnerability of its protagonist. Margo’s spatial awareness transcends any layperson’s; she can control her own movements and adapt to natural conditions with such precision that shooting an acorn from a fencepost or the cherry from an old man’s cigarette is a breeze. She’s so counterculture she feels burdened by having more possessions than she can easily gather up with little warning, dependent only on her pilfered Marlin rifle with the squirrel carved into the stock, her Annie Oakley tome, and the receptacle of her father’s ashes.
To refer to this novel as a coming of age tale would be to diminish the scope of the work; it’s also survivalist, naturalist, and feminist without ever becoming preachy or subversive. Once Upon a River is about more than survival or even the exploits of one disenfranchised youth living on the societal fringe; it’s about life and death and everything in between, about the courage to live a life of one’s own choosing, about summoning that intangible and often untapped spirit within us all to swim against the current.
