THE RIVER'S DAUGHTER

A trailblazing rafting guide retraces the events that led her to whitewater.

Crocker grew up alongside Wyoming’s Snake River, but her ascendance to rafting renown was not straightforward. The author’s pensive, potent full-length debut is a twisting journey from her childhood in a trailer park, through an adolescence pockmarked with divorce, abuse, drugs, parental neglect, and sexual assault, to the banks of the Zambezi River in the nascent days of East Africa rafting tours and the rampage of the HIV epidemic on the continent in the 1990s. While the constant in Crocker’s life is the magnificence of the rivers she travels and her reverential relationship with water, her story is more than a cataloging of exciting conquests, defining romances, and fearless adventures. With the distance of decades and the intervening years honing her literary skills, she turns a reprising eye to the people and forces that made her and advances keen observations on the tensions between adventure-based service industries, their patrons, and their geographies. Her efforts to explain and understand her parents is heartrending in its maturity and quest for empathy: Appreciating their work in “breaking the chain” welded by their own histories of trauma does not release them from their responsibility for harm she experienced as a child. As she makes her way back to the American West and into adulthood, she hints at the entirety of the emotional impact of her past and foreshadows the complicated work of confronting it, but the details of that work lie largely beyond the text. Instead, this is the story of how Crocker found the strength, not only to make inroads into a male-dominated, thrill-oriented career, proving herself to the gatekeepers of her industry, but also to provide her own protection.

A brave, sincere story of the shattering and saving powers of adrenaline and humility.