Word: river
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Finally, the glacier itself: a sheer cliff of white bleeding into rock. It's moving - though we can't see it - but the melting is visible in a raging river that pours down its side, as if bleeding. The Greenlanders in our group say it melts more and more each summer and recovers less and less. Actually, the speed of the glacier toward the sea has slowed in recent years - but that's not because there's more ice. Paradoxically, because so much ice has melted away in central Greenland, there is less pressure on the coastal glaciers to move...
...cargo should trouble arise. The two women form an uneasy partnership and, of course, bad things do start to haunt them. There are the cops and the border patrol to worry about. Also the dangerous scumbags who run the smuggling ring. And the possibility that the ice on the river might crack under the car's weight...
Possibly the best thing about Frozen River is that the mechanics of its busy plot do not intrude awkwardly on the portrait it offers of harsh, pinched lives. There's an easy reciprocity between Ray's struggles to evade the law and her attempts, say, to give her sons some sort of Christmas - a spindly tree, a present or two beneath...
...feel that Frozen River gives about as truthful a picture of American bleakness as it's possible for a movie to present. It is a movie that asks something of an audience, but it richly rewards our curiously rapt attention...
Stand the Storm By Breena Clarke; out now Calling all book clubs! Clarke, whose debut novel, River, Cross My Heart, was a 1999 Oprah pick, scores again with this Civil War--era saga, set in Washington. She tells the deeply affecting story of a family of freed slaves in an evocative, historically rich book that brings the turbulent period alive. The author neither averts her eye from, nor sugarcoats the truth about, the uphill struggle for dignity in this gritty town...