1818.

The title of the novel Leafy Rivers is not some evocatively named bucolic setting as the first edition's (1967) green-leaved cover artwork might suggest. It is the central character's name: Mary Pratt Converse marries Reno Rivers, but retains the nickname her brother gave her as a child thanks to her indecisive habit of answering 'never "yes" or "no" but always "I'd just as lief." '.

The novel covers not much more than one day in 1818 - but the bulk of it is in flashback; the building blocks of Leafy's life heaved into place by an author in complete command of language, atmospherics, and dialogue. Flashback: Leafy and Reno move to the Whitewater Valley after being gifted tenancy of a cabin by its landholder, Simon Yanders, who has abandoned it, having lost his wife to milk fever. Credit being short in 1818, he is later forced to foreclose on the couple causing Leafy to undertake a desperate, nightmarish and ultimately fateful two-day droving dash to cash in their herd of hog while her ailing, feverish husband is laid up with a severe injury.

Two centuries on, the reader, locked like an insect in the aspic of his twenty-first century choice, 'option' - and complacency - is reminded of the necessity and invention of earlier centuries. 'The bed Simon Yanders had built was in a fine spot to reconnoitre room and weather before getting up. It was built in the corner of the room, fireplace to the right .... window straight ahead. Before you put a foot out from under the covers, sun and fire had already told you their strength.'

There is a continual metaphoric interplay between the natural world, changing seasons and mood (both of character and scene) throughout: 'But it was the summer's climate that gilded all its happenings. Sometimes Leafy thought the sheen came down direct from the sky; sometimes she thought it sprayed out direct from her daydreaming ... '.

Spare dialogue devoid of archaism and historical cliché is delivered as if uttered in some cool transcendental atmosphere, fog hanging off the words. The reader, standing in that literary glade of observation, is unsettled, hearing the words spoken by someone whose bones, he knows, are underfoot; long gone but still ghostily present.

The author is not well known here; her book The Friendly Persuasion was filmed in 1956.

Leafy Rivers by Jessamyn West. Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc. New York 1967.