Hard times have come to her people; the animals have disappeared, her father is unable to catch fish to sell, and everyone in the community is too weak from hunger to work.

Calpurnia bravely leaves home with her little dog, Buggy-Horse, to find the secret river that her neighbor Mother Albirtha has told her about.

She also shares some fish with Mother Albirtha and takes the rest to her father, who gives them to the starving people in return for future payment.

[2] According to Murray Laurie, the idea for the book came from something Rawlings had written in Cross Creek: "some day a poet will write a sad and lovely story of a Negro child.

[5] Helen Masten, writing for The Saturday Review, commented "Had this happened this little masterpiece of the imagination of childhood might never have reached children, to whom it rightly belongs.

The river, York writes, expresses Rawlings' belief that "man must know or discover a relationship to a suitable physical setting"[7]: 92  in order to survive the harshness of the world, as she herself did on the St. Johns.

As Barbara Elleman wrote in School Library Journal, "Overriding the adventure is the determination and spirited effort of the child to help her family in need.

[11] The magic in the plot reinforces the sense of enchantment and gives the book a fairy-tale like quality,[12] leading the BolognaRagazzi Awards jury to speak of "the great Secret (that) lurks in the story".

: 56 The Secret River appeared two years after Rawlings' death with illustrations by the 1948 Caldecott Medal winner Leonard Weisgard, who used coffee-coloured paper as an innovative way to circumvent a taboo of the era against portraying dark-skinned characters.

[15] In his book In the Company of Writers, Charles Scribner discusses The Secret River's publication, noting Rawlings never mentions Calpurnia's race.

Scribner pointed out that "Whatever our decision, we could land on the wrong side of the school boards",[16] and claims the idea for using dark paper in the book as a way to suggest Calpurnia's race was his, calling it "one of my silent contributions to dissolving the color barrier in the 1950s.

[8] Unlike the more realistic illustrations by Weisgard, the Dillons emphasized the magical reality of the story,[10] as in the cover picture, where Calpurnia's profile is almost hidden inside a stylized blue fish.

Mary Harris Russell, writing for The Chicago Tribune, felt modern audiences would appreciate the way "the fantasy side to this land of cypress trees and silent rivers is amplified and contrasted with the realistic background of little Calpurnia's life.

In the words of the Bologna jury, "It is only fitting that Marjorie Rawlings, the great American writer loved by so many generations of readers, is finally paid such a refined and sensitive tribute.

"[13] When The Secret River first appeared in 1955, Saturday Review called it a "little masterpiece of the imagination of childhood... so real and appealing one regrets that this is the only book the author wrote for children... Leonard Weisgard has done some of his most sensitive work in drawings that have a feeling for character and place and are quite perfect for the text.