Although Home River is a work of fiction, readers should not underestimate the great amount of historicity therein. Rodney Nelson has captured in carefully honed language the distinctive lilt of Norwegian-American dialect and the political and social atmosphere of the Red River Valley of the North in the middle 1940s. By imagining one small episode from that era, he achieves an authenticity of voice and color which might not have been possible in a strict recounting or memoir. Rodney Nelson has studied the valley for most of his life; his novels, stories and books of poems reflect his clear-eyed, unsentimental love for this rich land and difficult climate, and for the equally complex people who chose to settle the area, his grandparents among them. Home River is first of all a work of fiction whose intent is simply to please-but one of the many other things the book does is to help us preserve our knowledge of the immigrant pioneering spirit as manifested in the settlers of the Red River Valley and their children.
