Where the River Bends [Hardcover]

Barry Raine (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2002

On a balmy October night in New Orleans, a group of teenage students gathers to listen to music and drink wine on the bank of the Mississippi River. In the midst of their revelry, a lone young man approaches them as a friendly stranger. In the following hour, he commits acts of sexual violence that have permanent lasting effects on his four young victims. In an intimate, unsparingly honest first-person account, Barry Raine, one of the victims, recounts this brutal encounter. Meditating on race, social class, male honor, and the rigid mores of the South, the author weaves a disturbing but ultimately hopeful story of loss and redemption.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

One night in 1981, Raine witnessed the brutal rape of his friend Catherine at a secluded turn of the Mississippi in New Orleans' Audubon Park. In this haunting memoir, he explores the emotional aftershocks of that event and how it changed, if not defined, the next 20 years of the lives of everyone it affected. With sublime restraint and disarming honesty, Raine comes to terms with his relationship with his uneducated father, with the southern ideal of manhood, and with race and racism in the scalding cultural gumbo that is New Orleans. Despite such weighty subject matter, he has no agenda and no generalizations to make. He presents the story as his own, never seeking to speak for anyone else, including, especially, Catherine. He vividly portrays her struggle afterwards, but from the outside, knowing that any sympathy is too little. He and Catherine managed to attain a clear-eyed acceptance that can pass for hope and the determination to avoid always defining themselves as victims, from which they wrest redemption and self-forgiveness. Will Hickman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

A document uniquely of our time; compelling in its honesty, riveting in its prose. -- Joyce Carol Oates

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 150 pages
• Publisher: Ontario Review Press; 1st edition (May 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865381046
• ISBN-13: 978-0865381049
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,389,251 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book!, January 26, 2008

By 

Palmeda Day (Sebastopol, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Where the River Bends (Hardcover)

Where the River Bends: A Memoir

Barry Raine has the gift of writing a detailed account of an incident that literally changed his life. His detail places you right next to him as a silent observer at the moment of fear and the trauma in his mind as he relives that night that started out innocently. Descriptions of his family interactions and those with others are so pure the reader will never forget them. I would like to hear more from this author. Soooo Good.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Buy this book, April 30, 2002

By 

"ducksquack" (New Hope, PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Where the River Bends (Hardcover)

I read this sad book in one long evening. Because it was slim, yes, but more because it wouldn't leave my hands. Mr. Raine has a powerful (and horrible) story, but what makes this book brilliant is the angles he chooses to explore the story; the not-obvious prisms he holds up for us to look through. He does his characters -- all real people, of course -- the honor of bringing them to life on the page as much as they are in New Orleans, or his memory.