Book Review: Trouble River

Title: Trouble River

Author: Betsy Byars

Date: 1969

Publisher: Viking Penguin

ISBN: 0-14-034243-5

Length: 158 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Rocco Negri

Quote: "It ain't safe out there...a lot can happen out here in four days. Wouldn't surprise me none if there was Indians all over the place by now."

A nineteenth-century twelve-year-old, on the prairie near the Mississippi River, has built a raft. His parents have left him with his grandmother and the dog. An "Indian" raiding party has noticed, and there's a territorial war on. Luckily, Dewey has built a raft they can use to float to a settlement, only forty miles away.

Trouble River reads like a family legend, fondly embellished, very likely true. There's no serious doubt that Dewey will survive his trip, or that casualties will be recorded. Will Dewey's family be together again at the end? Dewey doesn't know--and it won't hurt young readers to consider whether, at twelve, they'd be able to reenact Dewey's trip. Dewey has to work and think and take responsibility but doesn't have to kill anybody. His generation proved themselves by workingwith their elders, not against them. Dewey's relationship with his grandmother, throughout his coming-of-age experience, is one of the nicer parts of this story and makes it enjoyable for adults as well as kids.

For twelve-year-olds this should be an easy read...when I was twelve I wouldn't have minded finding it in the school library, but it wouldn't have lasted me a week. (I remember skimming books like this one in the library, then making sure the book I took home for a week was longer and more of a challenge--Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books, Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Enright, Madeleine L'Engle's early science fiction, and Lois Lenski's Indian Captive were the sort of book that seemed worth taking home when I was twelve.) For eight-year-olds it should be a challenge, and Dewey's age, plus words like "renegades" and "confining" and "keelboats," keep it from being an embarrassingly "babyish" choice for twelve-year-olds in search of a fast read. If you're even as old as fifteen, haven't read a novel you care to discuss with your teacher, and need to turn in a book report on a novel, ulp, tomorrow, Trouble River might save you from humiliation, though not necessarily from being advised to choose something like The Red Badge of Courage next time.

Dewey's success "shooting" rapids, where real pioneers usually dragged their craft to shore and portaged around them, is the sort of improbable bit of luck that pops up in many family legends. Maybe in real life your great-grandfather portaged, and then again maybe he was the lucky one in a hundred who shot the rapids and landed with all the valuables still lashed down to his raft...who knows?