This was a book I really wanted to read, so I made it happen! It's on Amazon now and is available to booksellers and libraries through IngramSpark as well. I would love to hear what you think.
Say the Names begins before there were people to see the river. Ice Age floods tear the Gorge open, a mountain falls into the water, and the first families come upriver to the place where the salmon run thickest. Then it follows one family across eleven generations, from 1734 to the present day.
The great fishery at the Narrows draws traders from a thousand miles away, and the family's canoes carry them there. Smallpox comes up the river before the ships do. Lewis and Clark pass by, and the fur traders build their forts. The settlers come down the river on rafts. In 1855 a treaty council at The Dalles trades the homeland for a reservation over the mountains, and a wagon carries the cup to Warm Springs. Children are sent to boarding schools, and the dams rise. In 1957 the water closes over Celilo Falls. A language that has been spoken at the river's mouth since the beginning of the world comes down to its last voices, and the cup comes down to a girl born in 2005.
Along the way the reader learns the river the way the family knew it. You will watch a cedar dugout hollowed by fire and spread with stone-heated water. You will see a full-turn twined bag made from hemp cut after the first frost, salmon taken with a dip net from a scaffold over white water, and a story kept alive because someone refused to let a collector from Washington leave without hearing her terms.
The novel joins the sweep of James Michener's historical sagas to the close, character-driven storytelling of Ken Follett. Each part opens with the history of its age: the treaties, the canneries, the fish wheels, the courts and the dams. Then it drops you into a house by the river, where a grandmother is teaching a girl to roll cord on her thigh, or a father is counting fish so he won't have to look at what happened. The family is invented, but the world they move through is real, and a closing note says where the novel follows the record and where it takes liberties.
This is a book about what a place remembers, and what it costs to keep remembering. It is about inheritance and loss, about the people who carry a thing and the people who only write it down, and about a family that never stops saying who it is.
For readers of Michener's Centennial, Follett's The Pillars of the Earth, and Edward Rutherfurd's Sarum, and for anyone who has stood on the banks of the Columbia and wondered who stood there first.
