3.5 *'s. You just know from the beginning that this is going to be a wild and crazy ride. Four women who are best friends take an annual trip together, whitewater rafting in the most remote part of Maine. This Deliverance style tale of survival is a fast paced page turner. The ominous setting and action scenes are great. As far as characters go, the novel fell a bit flat. Win, the main character, is decently drawn, but the other three characters are lacking. I also did not find it particularly believable in many ways. To start with, I couldn't believe that women in their 30's with no rafting experience would choose to go on this extremely dangerous trip simply from peer pressure. It still an enjoyable quick read if you don't mind it being a bit far-fetched.

This book was a little too much Deliverance for me. It reminds me of the girls in horror films who always have on high heels when they need to run.

I typically love thrillers, but this book did not grab my attention. I did not leave a review online for this book, because I felt that would be unfair to the author and book as I did not finish it.

This was a wide ride. I couldn't put it down. Beautifully written. The descriptions placed me at the scene, the pace had my heart beating widly, and the characters had me rooting for them. Because I went to school in Maine and Boston, I felt a strong connection to the story. The author put together an interesting tale of familial relationships between friends and the ends they'd go to save each other, but mostly surviving for themselves. This is at the top of my list for 2017.

Definitely a page turner! I've never been so completely involved in a story, while simultaneously wanting to stop reading it. Mother Nature makes one scary villain on her own, but everything else wrapped up in this book makes it all the more intense. Wonderful!

3.7 - well, I don't think I'll be going camping with my girlfriends anytime soon - you never knew what was going to happen (but you knew it would be going wrong); good writing

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Believable characters, plot twists, unexpected tragedies and woven throughout with real human emotions that send the characters to consequences they must own. An exciting read from front to back.

The River at Night - wow. It was a fast, exhilarating rollercoaster of a read. Exciting, what's coming around the bend, the end must be coming up - nope, we're going around again! It was a combination of The River Wild meets Deliverance. I can see this book being made into a movie.
Wini and her long-time girlfriends take time each year to meet, catch up and enjoy life beyond their day-to-day experiences with work and family. This year, Wini has experienced the death of her brother and her marriage, meaning white-water rafting does not sound like a relaxing getaway to deal with loss. But she needs her girlfriend time and reluctantly decides to go along. What comes next places Wini and her friends in the most dangerous, life-threatening situations imaginable, and not all of them will make it safely out of the Maine backwoods.
The characters and their surroundings were described in vivid detail by the author. I could picture myself in the uninhabited wild areas of Maine. The River at Night is a combination of The River Wild meets Deliverance. I can see this book being made into a movie that I would drag everyone to see.

This book starts out with your typical city ladies looking for adventure in the great outdoors. Then once they're really out there the first twist comes and you think things might actually get interesting. But then it continues and concludes with your typical ending.

Four women (Wini, Pia, Rachel and Sandra) embark on a river rafting trip only to be met with challenges and tragedy.

Wini, the story's narrator, is a reluctant participant in this girl's trip and would have preferred to embark on a less adventurous, more relaxing vacation with her girlfriends. Pia, however, is the leader of the group and makes the final, and fateful, decision to do a river rafting trip in Maine. There are many twists and turns along the way -- both in the story and the river; see what I did there? haha -- but for some reason, I just didn't connect with this story or the characters (although I did enjoy the writing style). In the end, the characters learned to appreciate life regardless of their struggles or losses, and in my opinion, it was wrapped up a little too neatly.

Thank you to the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for a free ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review!

It wasn't a bad story.I loved the promise of this one.However I felt like something was missing.I needed something more.More emotions,more fear and generally I wanted to feel like I'm a part of the story and unfortunately this doesn't happen

What a wild ride, a must read. I can't wait for the movie!

Holy crap this book grabbed my attention, and if I was a faster reader I would have finished it in one day instead of two! I also couldn't stop talking about it to my husband. It's like Deliverance, but substitute women and take out the violent sex, it's a wild ride!

Let me first say I'm not an adventure seeker and I didn't really see this as part of Winifred's persona either, so I thought she was quite the team player and friend for agreeing to a water rafting trip in sparsely populated Maine. While I'm sure the undisturbed beauty of the Allagash Wilderness is real, the thought of hiking and rafting in it has little appeal. Just the drive up there seemed bleak and scary to me. Erica Ferencik described the landscape and the lack of commerce and people perfectly. The one gas station/restroom is a visual I'll never forget.

Being left alone to manage the river, plot a way out and back to civilization is tough enough, discovering people who live far off the grid adds an ominous tone to the already high stakes adventure. Every page and chapter in this book bring more challenges and a real test of their friendship. I enjoyed seeing the relationships of Wini,

I loved this book, it was well paced and the language is beautiful and the emotions run wild. My heart raced and I was reading, I couldn't wait to find out what happened next. If you're a fan of suspense, this is a book you're going to love.

The River at Night gets off to a slow start and builds up into a fight for survival.

Winn seems to be afraid of everything, she is not much for doing anything too adventurous, but she needs to do something to forget Richard her ex-husband and take her mind off the death of her brother. So when her friend Pia decides she wants to go white water rafting, even against her better judgment she decides to go.

It takes a while to get to the actual white water rafting part, lets say about half the book. Once you get to it though it's pretty intense and one wild ride. Then things go bad and there are four women who know nothing about surviving in the woods out there all alone with nothing.

Each woman is a bit different and I never really connected fully with any of them but I was still rooting for them to make it out alive. Pia, seem to be trying to prove she was still young by hooking up with the young guide. Sandra, had finally decided she was going to leave her controlling husband, Rachel was a bit high strung and could get kind of mean, and then Winn was just afraid of everything like I said before, but she stepped up a few times when she had too but she so got on my nerves a lot.

There was one thing that bothered me and that was that there was only one guide on the white water raft with for inexperienced women. He admitted to only going on the rapids about five times so to me he wasn't really an expert and he was only twenty-two. It just didn't seem very realistic to me.

Other than that it was a decent read and I did enjoy it once I got to the exciting part.

The River at Night is a story of four middle-aged women (friends for years) who decide to go on an adventurous and remote whitewater rafting trip in Maine, despite the reservations most of them have about the whole thing. It's meant to be thrilling and exciting (or so I assume from the marketed genre of the book), but it has its highs and lows (and the lows are really more than they ought to be).

For most of the first half of this book, I was bored out of my mind and definitely ready to throw in the towel. It was full of introspection and backstory and overwriting, and I couldn't see how this book would be classified as a thriller. It definitely seemed like more of a drama between friends, if even that, and it didn't live up to expectations. Even the early parts describing their rafting adventure weren't all that thrilling to me.

A little more than halfway through, things did pick up and I no longer wanted to put the book down. I wanted to keep reading to figure out what was going to happen. It was definitely the thriller we were promised from this point, and I was glad I'd stuck it out.

That's the thing, though: is it really a thriller worth reading if nothing even remotely thrilling or exciting happens until at least halfway through? I'm not so sure. And beyond that, I didn't love the Simone/Dean story. I understand that it's part of what lends some suspense to the story, but psychos appearing out of nowhere just really aren't that plausible to me.
Plus, and this is a small spoiler, I didn't buy that Dean would know any official, recognizable signs, having lived in the middle of the woods with his crazy mother for almost two decades. How would he have learned that? And if they weren't standard signs, how did Wini manage to understand him so well, to the point that they were having full conversations? Unless Simone learned sign language before running off to the woods (highly unlikely), I just don't see this as a real possibility.

So, I guess what I'm saying is that the beginning was pretty terrible in my opinion, and while the second half got more thrilling (and made me remember back to my naive youth, when I wanted to do things like whitewater rafting and chasing storms), it wasn't really all that plausible.

I don't do half stars and I debated between giving this two and three stars, but since the second half did pull me in, I gave it three. I'm still not positive I'd recommend this, though, at least not if what you're looking for is a plausible thriller. My overall feelings here are kind of "meh"and while you might enjoy this as a quick read, I don't think you'd be missing too much by skipping it.

*ARC from Gallery/Scout Press via NetGalley

Wini Allen is more than ready for her yearly vacation with her three best friends. Over the years they have visited tropical locations, but this year Pia has signed them up for white-water rafting in the wilds of Maine. The others are just as skeptical as Wini, but they trust that Pia has lined up an epic vacation. They are led into the wilds by their twenty-year-old guide, Rory. None of them, except Pia, have confidence in his abilities to get them down the river. And they were right. A tragic accident kills Rory, destroys their raft, their supplies, and leaves the four women to get themselves out of the wilds of Maine and the river is their only way out. They struggle through one night, freezing and starving. The next night they are the guests of one very scary lady and her mute son. They have lived off the grid since the 90's and Simonne is afraid that these four middle-aged women will ruin the life she has worked hard to keep secret. The four women are now in a fight for their lives and the rough river seems like the better option of the two. Will they make it out alive before the river or the angry woman kills them all?

It will not be long before The River at Night will be coming to a big screen near you. Wini is a great female lead that many (myself included) could relate to quite easily. She is divorced with no kids and completely devoted to her job. She was a little reluctant to go on the trip but was eager to be off work. Rachel and Sandra seemed like the kind of women that I would hang out with, but not sure I would go white water rafting with them. Pia, the organizer, was a little more spunky. A little more "I am gonna do what I want and the rest of you can go to hell," Her friends always kind of knew that about her, but the events of the trip made it blatant. The River at Night was one of those heart-stopping page-turners that maybe should be read during the daylight - with others in the room. I was so blown away by how natural the story flowed (pun intended) and kept me on the edge of my seat. That is why I can see it hitting the silver screen - it was just too suspenseful to not end up a movie.

Bottom line - If nothing else The River at Night taught me to never go white water rafting in the wilds of Maine. But it also reminded me how much I enjoyed a good thriller. The River at Night fits the bill, just be warned, these lady's use a bit of salty language when in scary situations - as would I.

Details:
The River at Night by Erica Ferencik
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Pages: 304
Publisher: Gallery/Scout Press
Publication Date: 1/10/2017
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A group of close friends get together every year to go on new adventures. This time the four women get wrapped up in a daring river wilderness trip, which only one of them is looking forward to, but that all will go along with to escape the humdrum of normal life. Of course the trip turns into a nightmare mesh of wilderness meeting human depravity.

The River of Night involves four women but is told singularly through the main character, Winnie, a recently divorced and middle-age woman who has a loyal heart and semi-adventurous spirit. The book opens with her small dabs of humor and self-approach, setting a good lead for the story. I dug how the author mainly focused on the dynamics of the friends, including some of them feeling a little betrayed by the boy-crazy friend who puts them to the side for a guide. It added a realism to the story that I frankly see in my own circle of friends. Their bond is strong but not unrealistically clean and chic-lit style. It's sweet because it's awesome but it's not sweet because it's syrupy.

It takes awhile to get to the tension, and when it finally does the story calms down a bit. They have real dangers to face but the second half could have delivered a bit more in some areas. The river is formidable element of nature to contend with and we get our tragedy involving it, but the book could have held other dangers to spice up the story-line, especially involving animals or other elements of the setting. Instead it focuses on the dangers of those who may want to live alone for a reason, a story theme that's been told several times before, but there are differences here that work. Winnie's past history with a brother works into the present because of a unique element of the story-line.

While salvation is granted, there's a bittersweet line that the freedom removed from the the wilderness isn't always a perfect solution. It's good closure but it's not a neat closure, which fits to be realistic and not simply clean and unlike actual life.

A nice balance of pacing and characters for a thriller that - while not fully unique - delivers what it sets out to: a harrowing ride with tense adventure.

My Review: 4/5

Four women (best friends) in their mid-30s go on an annual girls trip. This time, they decide to embark the treacherous rapids in Northern Maine. First of all, if any of my friends even suggested going on a trip where I’m in the middle of nowhere for a certain amount of time, I wouldn’t just say no, but Hell NO! Not only does going on a roaring rapids trip not appeal to me, but the thought of being that one with nature…uh, I’ll pass!

Well, the 4 friends start off their adventure and things start to go very wrong. Think of the movie Deliverance, but with women. From running into men with no teeth in a convenience store, with a freshly shot doe on their truck, to their every flamboyant instructor who tends to act as though he is the next Tarzan, you know it’s going to be quite a ride from the beginning.

I’m not giving away any of the adventures they encounter because it will take away from the suspense of the book. My heart raced at speed levels with every twist and turn.

The best thing I liked about the book was the strong friendship with these four women. Overcoming alcoholism, cancer, divorces, just to name a few things, they have been there for each other through thick and thin. This adventure of a lifetime puts their friendship and will to live to the test.

A very fast read, I highly recommend. Hold on tight, cause it’s a wild ride!



***Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a copy in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

I started The River At Night on an evening where I was fairly sleepy and after I hit the 20% mark on my Kindle I found myself begrudgingly having to close the cover and go to sleep. The next night was a Friday night, however, and I found myself reading until long after midnight, unable to put the book down until I finished. It's a tale of four friends who decide to take a gal-pal weekend adventure deep into the wilds of Maine, miles from any other human (or so they thought) to go white water rafting. Ferencik has an incredible talent as a writer, enabling the reader to easily envision the scenes and the people that bring them to life. The River at Night is a book that rockets you along with intense ups and downs, barely letting you pause to get your head above water before you are plunged headlong, with the characters, down the next rapid. I'm still reeling from it, days later. A fantastic, thrilling read.

I did something with this book that I don't think I've ever done before. As soon as I finished it, I went right back to the beginning and skimmed it again, slowing down to read my favorite passages.

The book is beautifully written, evoking the darkness of rural Maine forests and the fury of the river. It was hard to take the time to slow down and truly appreciate the writing during the first read of the book, since the plot was action packed, grabbing me and not letting go. Nonetheless, the descriptive writing stood out, making me want to revisit it. Ferencik sustains a metaphor throughout the book, that of the river as a sensate being. Her initial description of this is stunning, and where it bubbles to the surface again and again, it continues to enthrall.

Read this book if you appreciate being transported to a remote setting, if you like books about relationships between women in all their messy complexity, and/or if you enjoy a captivating action-based plot. If you've read Dickey's "Deliverance," you will find moments when "The River at Night" is reminiscent. But Ferencik, while calling upon some of the same themes to add menace, manages to avoid being derivative.