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Colorado Springs Reading Program Selects Book Inspired by Destruction of Small Colorado Town | Arts & Entertainment

Posted on by angelo

This year’s All Pikes Peak Reads selection offers more than just good fiction. It also offers a lesson in Colorado history.

“Go As a River” by Shelley Read is the flagship book of the Pikes Peak Library District’s annual community reading program.

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The Pikes Peak Library District’s new All Pikes Peak Reads selection is “The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line: Untold Stories of the Women Who Changed the Course of World War II,” by Maj. Gen. (ret.) Mari K. Eder. Complementing the nonfiction books will be the traveling exhibit “Americans and the Holocaust,” from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The 1,100-square-foot interactive exhibit explores America’s response to Nazism, war and genocide in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. It opens in September at the East Library.

“We haven’t published a fiction book in years,” said Heidi Buljung, PPLD’s senior librarian. “This is historical fiction that opens your eyes to a lesser-known part of Colorado history. It’s great that it brings together real historical events in the story of a young woman’s life.”

Read, a graduate of Doherty High School who now lives on the western slopes of the Gunnison Valley, was inspired by the destruction of the small town of Iola in Gunnison County. In the mid-1960s, the Blue Mesa Dam and Reservoir project flooded the town and forced hundreds of families to relocate.

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It is often said: “in vino veritas”, or “in wine there is truth”.

The novel introduces readers to Victoria Nash, a 17-year-old girl who runs her family’s peach farm in Iola and has a life-changing chance encounter with a drifter displaced from his tribal land. After a tragedy, Victoria flees her home and takes refuge in the surrounding mountains, where she struggles to survive as the Gunnison River threatens to submerge her town and home.

The film rights to the 2023 book have been acquired.

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Historian and author Mark Lee Gardner will receive the Frank Waters Award, children’s author Donna Guthrie will receive the Golden Quill Award, and Jim and Mary Ciletti, owners of Hooked on Books, will receive the Best Friend Award at the Friends of Pikes Peak Library District Annual Literary Awards luncheon on June 1.

The book is available now at all PPLD branches, as well as in eBook and eAudio formats. Read will be giving a free presentation and book signing on October 5 at the 21c Library.

To complement the book, PPLD will offer free activities in September. Author David Primus will give a lecture on the history of the Gunnison Valley before the completion of the Blue Mesa Reservoir; El Paso County CSU Extension will give water canning classes; and a local chef will teach people how to make peach crumble. For more information, visit ppld.org/appr.

Contact the author: 636-0270