River is the story of a fourteen-year-old girl who travels back in time, and across continents, encountering her maternal forbears when they were her age. From the Australian Outback, where she meets a young Aboriginal man, to racist, rigidly segregated South Africa during World War II, to the midst of a pogrom in Lithuania, and then all the way back to the Babylon of biblical times, Emily has deep encounters with the young women she meets, as well as with the history that shapes them -- and ultimately, the histories that have mysteriously and yet powerfully shaped her own soul.