Eternal on the Water by Joseph Monninger

I received this book for free courtesy of the Barnes and Noble First Look program. As we're still discussing the book on the boards, the rest of my review is posted beneath the cut.
Although there were many aspects of this book that struck me as implausible, or rubbed me the wrong way, I was in tears by the time I finished reading it. The text reveals its own ending in its first section: Mary Fury, the woman whom Jonathan Cobb meets on a kayak trip following Henry David Thoreau down the Allegash River in Maine and with whom he falls immediately and passionately in love, is dead. Knowing how the story ends didn't lessen my interest in the book or ruin the journey. The book, which chronicles Mary and Cobb's love affair from its first moments to its ending, does several things very well. I enjoyed the quality of Monninger's prose, Mary's role as a storyteller (she's developed a broad and beautiful mythology of crows and other corvids, mixing stories from many different sources), and the text's commitment to show nature in all its beauty. I found the love at first sight part of the love story implausible, as well as the frame story (in which Cobb apparently tells the long, intimate story of their love to a ranger he's just met). Although this book is far from perfect, I'm grateful I had the chance to read it and would recommend it to others.