Ellen Notbohm

Annie made the quilt for her future husband, for his eyes only.

There was a block with a sliver of chrome orange moon and a fabric with a chrome yellow shower of stars. The twilight sky was represented with a dark sapphire with a swirl of white dots and a cadet blue shot with white. At the bottom curved a river in green fabric. She called it River By Starlight.

In 1911 Annie Rushton had received a letter from her older brother Cal, inviting her to come to Montana where he had settled. At age show more 26, Annie was living with her mother after postpartum psychosis destroyed her marriage and separated her from her baby daughter.

Annie hopes that Montana will bring the freedom she craves and the new beginning she desperately needs. Annie travels light, only taking her ivory knitting needles, her Emily Dickinson inscribed "with everlasting love" by her ex-husband, and her grandmother's rose glass jar.

She never expected that Montana would bring a man who would claim her, body and soul, or imagine the ecstasy and the crippling pain and loss their love would endure, driving Annie to a desperate choice.

Ellen Notbohm's novel The River by Starlight is based on true events which she spent years researching. Notbohm wanted to give voice to the women, who a hundred years ago and with few resources, suffered mental health issues in a male-dominated health and justice system.

Annie is an amazing character, strong and feisty, quick-witted and quick-tempered. I loved the dialogue between the characters. Although Annie suffers many losses, she also is resilient and a survivor. The misunderstandings between men and women and the compromises they make ring true. The writing is gorgeous.

Readers will be swept back in time and won't soon forget the vivid characters.

I received a free book through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review. show less

Ellen Notbohm’s new book, The River by Starlight, tells the story of a homesteading couple in Montana in the early 1900s struggling with the wife's recurring postpartum depression. The book was inspired by research into Ellen's own family history.

Maternal mental health rarely appears in historical fiction, which makes this book a particularly interesting historical novel. The frontier setting also creates space around the topic to examine it without today’s expectations or pre-conceived show more ideas about solutions. Just how would a woman and her partner deal with postpartum psychosis, given the general ignorance and social stigma surrounding women’s mental health issues in the early 20th century, not to mention the gender-biased laws of the day?

Notbohm does a good job of telling both Annie and Adam’s stories authentically. Annie is the main player, but Adam’s grief and desperation also ring true. show less

Every well-wrought sentence in The River by Starlight is as beautiful as the Henry David Thoreau inspired title. Author Ellen Notbohm has penned a breathlessly epic, masterful story set in early 1900’s Montana in language so lyrically elevated you’ll want to commit much of it to memory but will have to get back to it later—you’ll be too busy turning the pages.
The River by Starlight is a starkly humanistic story. It’s an historical novel intimately and engagingly written in present show more tense concerning the sweeping life story of dark-haired and diminutive Annie Rushton, whose young marriage is permanently marred by what might be the time’s inchoate perceptions of post-partum depression. There are repercussions to Annie’s malady that propel her to leave everything behind in her home state of Iowa and hop a train to join her bachelor brother in the wilds of homesteading Montana, where she risks starting a new life. Shouldering her heartbreak, Annie applies her headstrong, fierce independence to helping her brother prosper, so when charismatic businessman Adam Fielding, a colleague of her brother’s, enters her life, theirs is a relationship forged on mutual ambition, but as the years wear on, they become two desperate souls unwittingly tossed by the unpredictable storms of life. show less

I received an advanced reader copy of "The River by Starlight" by Ellen Notbohm and I'm so glad I did. My goodness from the first chapter the author weaves a tale of love, tragic loss, heart-breaking details of life, along with a beautifully descriptive writing style that encompasses the story in a way that confides in the reader.

The details of the story are set in the early 1910's to 1940's as it trails the main character, Annie as she receives a letter from her brother Cal, to join him on show more his homestead in Montana to help care for him and the house. She accepts the offer and after settling in she meets her brother's boss, Adam Fielding. It was certainly not love at first sight, but in time Adam is taken by her strong character and proceeds to court her. Part of the author's charm shines through her descriptions of historical events and through her dialogue between characters. On one encounter with Adam, Annie describes a detail about Adam's horse and finds herself falling privy to his questioning conversation. "I see he's missing something," she says, and kicks herself for falling into yet another prickly conversation with him. Stuck now, like a hair in a biscuit." The author's style of writing had me laughing, rooting for the characters, and crying alongside all of the tragic loss and heartache.

Even with how beautifully written this story was, I was really impressed with the author's prose in writing about mental illness and postpartum depression, showing that it isn't pretty but it's REAL. It not only affects the individual struggling with it, but Ellen Notbohm shows how it affects others around them. Mental illness is still as subject that doesn't seem to get enough attention in today's world, let alone the time period in which this story takes place. I applaud the author for taking those risks and for writing a beautifully and heart-wrenching story that became, "The River of Starlight".

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