Mary Alice Monroe, New York Times best selling author of thirty books, has taken a divergent path with her new historical novel. In Where the Rivers Merge (William Morrow 2025) we follow a journey that transports us in time and place between the grand city of Charleston, South Carolina, and a lush Lowcountry plantation to an era when life was simpler and yet so much more difficult.
The story begins in 1908 with our introduction to Eliza, an uninhibited eight-year-old girl who claims the wildness of her surroundings as her own:
“The child stood in the enclosed garden as the sun lowered into a crimson sky. The moss-draped oaks stood watch and the countless white camellias seem to shimmer in the twilight as the world held its breath.”
She then heard “ … the first, faint, nasal calls of ducks.” Knowing hunters were poised in the distance, “Fly away, her heart cried out.”
Eliza meets and claims her new best friend, Covey, who explains her name to Eliza by saying, “Covey. Like a flock of birds.” For the next decade, Eliza and Covey are inseparable despite the fact that their skin is a different color, a fact which ultimately causes some insurmountable problems.
Eliza Rivers Chalmers DeLancey has always been a force to be reckoned with. We meet her again in 1988 on her eighty-eighth birthday as she awakens from a dream that brings her comfort, and then has to quickly settle herself into a Chanel suit and Ferragamo flats for a birthday breakfast with her son and his family. From there she slips into a meeting with her lawyer and subsequently takes control of a shareholder’s meeting that is heading in the wrong direction. Then, just as she warned the ducks eighty years ago, Eliza heeds her own call and furtively flies off to her beloved Lowcountry plantation, Mayfield.
Once she has settled into Mayfield, we wind back and forth through eighty years of Eliza’s life as she shares her lifetime of stories with the two people she devoutly hopes will carry on her astonishing legacy. A ground breaker, rule breaker, a leader among women, Eliza’s reality probably surpassed her very own dreams. But as a little girl, she was seeking to find a way in a world that expected girls to accede to the norms of the times and she just wanted to be free to do as she wished.
The Rivers family dynamic is an interesting one. Daddy, Rawlings, is a good old boy—he loves to hunt and ride and is quite attached to his land. Mother, Sloane, is high-strung, mercurial, and much prefers the fancy life in Charleston to the rural life on the plantation. Heyward, the older brother, is a man among men—thoughtful, considerate, generous of spirit, fun-loving, and passionate about life. Lesesne, the younger brother, is spoiled, jealous, snarky, and as Eliza said, “When he looked at you in a certain way, there was a coldness that set one ill at ease.”
In some introspective foreshadowing, Eliza muses:
“I thought about how we Rivers children were like those owl fledglings. Tonight we were all flying from the nest. Which of us would succeed on the wing? I wondered. Which of us would fall to the earth?”
Birds are symbolic in this story. There is even a bird reference to Mayfield: “Two symmetrical buildings flanked the main wooden house like the wings of a swan about to take flight.” Throughout the book, over one hundred references are made about birds, which illustrate, among other things, the various characters’ need for the freedom to make their own choices.
With freedom, there always comes a price. Making her own choices is the crux of what Eliza has faced when fighting for the preservation of her beloved family plantation. Mayfield is her love, her life’s work, her heart and soul. Unfortunately, we learn early on that her only child, Arthur, doesn’t have the same vision; greed outweighs primogeniture in his mind and his daughters are not even considered. His devious little self seeks to take control of something he hasn’t invested one whit in, but thinks belongs to him as his entitled inheritance. His vision for the future involves his own pockets rather than having a remote understanding about his mother’s lifelong battle for perpetuity and bid for conservation.
Eliza’s story encompasses many greats: friendship, love, tragedy, and most of all—resilience. Where the Rivers Merge is only part one of two, so we are left, at the end of this book, hanging over the edge of, not a cliff, but a very long, splinter-borne, rickety dock perched precariously over possibly gator-infested waters.
Mary Alice Monroe
New York Times bestselling author Mary Alice Monroe found her true calling in environmental fiction when she moved to coastal South Carolina. Already a successful author, she was captivated by the beauty and fragility of her new home. Her experiences living in the midst of a habitat that was quickly changing gave her a strong and important focus for her novels. Monroe lives with her family on Isle of Palms, a barrier island off Charleston, South Carolina. For additional information, go to www.maryalicemonroe.com.
Leave a Reply