The River in My Backyard

OF ALL THE HAUNTING MEMOIRS THAT I HAVE READ, Mikkel Aaland’s The River in My Backyard, is at once the most heart-rending and the most courageously triumphant. Aaland explores two rivers, the literal one that runs past his ancestral home in Norway, and the metaphorical one that runs in the blood of his ancestors, himself, and now his two daughters. By the time the two rivers flow into one another, through crystalline prose and shadow fretted photographs, his story has become a healing journey of