O River Remember Author:Martha Ostenso It was surely providential--the chance meeting between Brill Wing and Morna Shaleen on a street corner in a small Minnesota town that day in the Sprint of 1941. They hadn't seem each other since childhood, but they shared a feeling that, with their meeting, the tangled fortunes of the Wings and the Shaleens would come straight at last. — The con... more »flict between the two families went back to frontier days in the Red River Valley. Ivar Wing had emigrated there from Norway in the 1870's. He loved the land, but he didn't want any more or it than he could work himself. To his wife
Magdali, however, it spelled wealth and power, and she rode roughshod over the Shaleens, their dreamy, easygoing neighbors, to acquire vast holdings. But, in the end, her greed brought nothing but tragedy and unhappiness to her children.
So it remined for Brill and Norma, of the third generation, to vindicate the broken hopes and the ill-starred loves of the Wings and the Shaleens who had gone before them.« less