This year’s All Pikes Peak Reads selection offers more than just good fiction. It also offers a lesson in Colorado history.
“Go As a River” by Shelley Read is the featured book in the Pikes Peak Library District’s annual community reading program.
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The Pikes Peak Library District’s new All Pikes Peak Reads selection is “The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line: Untold Stories of the Women Who Changed the Course of World War II” by Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Mari K. Eder. The nonfiction books are accompanied by the traveling exhibit “Americans and the Holocaust” from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. The 1,000-square-foot interactive exhibit examines America’s response to Nazism, war, and genocide in Europe in the 1930s and ’40s. It opens in September at the East Library.
“We haven’t published a novel in years,” said PPLD director Heidi Buljung. “It’s a historical novel that takes you to a lesser-known part of Colorado’s history. It’s great that it wraps true historical events into the narrative of a young woman’s life.”
Read, who graduated from Doherty High School and now lives on the Western Slope in the Gunnison Valley, was inspired by the destruction of the small Gunnison County ranching town of Iola. In the mid-1960s, the town was flooded by the Blue Mesa Dam and Reservoir project, forcing hundreds of families to relocate.
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It is often said: “In vino veritas” or “There is truth in wine.”
The novel introduces readers to Victoria Nash, a 17-year-old who runs her family’s household on their peach farm in Iola and has a life-changing chance encounter with a drifter who has been driven from his tribal lands. After tragedy strikes, Victoria flees her home and seeks refuge in the surrounding mountains, where she struggles to survive as the Gunnison River threatens to flood her town and home.
The film rights for the 2023 book have been secured.
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Historian and author Mark Lee Gardner will receive the Frank Waters Award, children’s author Donna Guthrie will receive the Golden Quill Award, and Jim and Mary Ciletti, owners of Hooked on Books, will receive the Best Friend Award at the Friends of Pikes Peak Library District Annual Literary Awards luncheon on June 1.
The book is now available in all PPLD branches and as an e-book and eAudio. Read will give a free presentation and host a meet & greet and book signing on October 5th in Library 21c.
To complement the book, PPLD is offering free activities in September. Author David Primus will give a talk on the history of the Gunnison Valley before the completion of the Blue Mesa Reservoir; the El Paso County CSU Extension will offer water canning classes; and a local chef will teach people how to make a peach pie. More information is available online at ppld.org/appr.
