Prologue My great-grandmother Morrison fixed a book rest to her spinning wheel so that she could read while she was spinning, or so the story goes. And one Saturday evening she became so absorbed in her book that when she looked up, she found that it was half past midnight and she had spun for half an hour on the Sabbath day.
Back then, that counted as a major sin. I used to stand in front of it, as a very small child, daring myself to meet her eyes. She was small, tight-lipped, and straight, dressed in black with a white lace collar scrubbed ruthlessly, no doubt, every single evening and ironed before dawn each day.
She looked severe, disapproving, and entirely without humor. And well she might; she had fourteen children in thirteen years and five hundred acres of barren farmland on the Gaspe Peninsula. He was far from grim, but he had the same straight mouth and steady gray eyes. If I fidgeted in church and got a sharp glance from my mother, I would peer sideways up at Matt to see if he had noticed. And he always had, and looked severe, and then at the last possible moment, just as I was beginning to despair, he would wink.
Matt was ten years older than I, tall and serious and clever. His great passion was the ponds, a mile or two away across the railroad tracks. They were old gravel pits, abandoned years ago after the road was built, and filled by nature with all manner of marvelous wriggling creatures.
When Matt first started taking me back to the ponds I was so small he had to carry me on his shoulders through the woods with their luxuriant growth of poison ivy, along the tracks, past the dusty boxcars lined up to receive their loads of sugar beets, down the steep sandy path to the ponds themselves. There we would lie on our bellies while the sun beat down on our backs, gazing into the dark water, waiting to see what we would see.
There is no image of my childhood that I carry with me more clearly than that; a boy of perhaps fifteen or sixteen, fair-haired and lanky; beside him a little girl, fairer still, her hair drawn back in braids, her thin legs burning brown in the sun. They are both lying perfectly still, chins resting on the backs of their hands. He is showing her things. She reflects on her childhood as she reluctantly prepares to return for a family gathering.
Her account slowly reveals details of the broken dreams and sacrifices that they all made in their efforts to keep the family together.
Nothing very dramatic happens yet it elegantly portrays events that affect most families — hopeful aspirations, misunderstandings, missed chances and sibling rivalry. I have several brothers and sisters of my own so parts of this story provoked reflections of my own life. I thoroughly enjoyed this finely crafted and bittersweet tale of survival and love of family.
Betsy Robinson. Author 9 books followers. I feel such a commonality with this book—Mary Lawson's style, the movements, the issues, the dialogue that is perfect pitch and as natural as breathing—that it almost renders me speechless. It's a story about children raising children.
About no grownups. About being propelled into adult responsibility as a child and the delusions of survivor's guilt. I believe her. The commonality I feel is not that I've lived this story because I haven't. What I feel is that, were I Canadian and from similar land, I too might have imagined it as she did. Recently Goodreader Larry Hoffer wrote: "Did you ever get the feeling you and an author would be great friends or perhaps mortal enemies , simply based on the books they write and the way they tell stories?
She seems to think the same thoughts and write them the way I would, and it's spooky and I love it and I love this book. It quietly and gently knocked the wind out of me. I've found a new favorite writer. Until I read Crow Lake , I never realized the full extent that survivor's guilt has clouded my vision of my dead mother, whose book I edited and published a couple of years ago.
I'd imagined that she suffered terribly in life because she never had my solo writer's life--a life that she might have enjoyed more than marriage and a whole bunch of kids who she didn't really want to take care of. Don't worry, I worked all that stuff out a long time before she died, and we became best adult girl friends.
In my opinion, Mary Lawson offers the best a fiction writer can offer: the possibility for a reader to suddenly have a dark room lit up and realize the monsters you've installed there don't exist.
Never existed. That's why, a day after finishing this masterful quiet novel, I'm still vibrating. Author books followers. I koje se dugo pamte Lisa Vegan. I really liked this book. Every character is sufficiently developed that I felt as though I knew them well and that I would immediately recognize them if I ever met any of them. I thought the family relationships and the psychology of each character were presented in an authentic and believable way.
The writing is lovely too. No complaints about any of the above. There was constant foreshadowing in this book. There was also more than one major event including a big reveal. I really liked the story anyway but it was the slice of life scenes and the characters and their relationships that made the book work for me.
I thought it was a great book though. I read it for my real world book club. Because of the libraries being closed during the pandemic I borrowed an e-copy from my library and chose the Kindle format.
I started it before and ended it after I broke my clavicle on my dominant side, so a lot happened in my life the 5 days I spent reading it. Daisy Jones and The Six. Oh William! Great Circle. The Party Crasher. The Island of Missing Trees. The Paper Palace. Miranda Cowley Heller. You and Me on Vacation. The Shadow. To Kill A Mockingbird. Our top books, exclusive content and competitions.
Straight to your inbox. Sign up to our newsletter using your email. Enter your email to sign up. Thank you!
0コメント