It's a strange thing that I came across this book. I found it wedged into the back of a shelf downstairs. It seems I read it at the perfect time. It came to me in the midst of serious, physical grief, the kind where your body is taken over by sadness and is simply a vessel for your shaking and sobbing and wailing. Oh the wailing. You will wail. And not in the Wayne's World sense. Its the kind of thing that you can't let anyone else listen to, because what the wailing is is the pain leaving your body. That pain, floating about untethered, can do serious injury. That's why you do it alone. So the same day I'm holding my cousin's 14 hour old baby in my arms, and the knowledge that my own mother won't be there when I hold my children in my arms for the first time- or any time- comes searing through my blood, I find this book. Kate's parents are both killed in a car crash when she is seven years old, on a day that had begun like any other. As an adult, Kate returns to the year following her parents death, when, to prevent the family from being broken apart more, Luke, the oldest, then 19, decides to raise Matt, 17, Kate ,7, and Bo, 1, on his own. Perhaps it is hardest for Kate. Losing both parents at seven years old. Such a vulnerable age. Her fear is palpable. If one of her brothers is late coming home, she is certain, until she sees his face, that he is dead too. It's heartbreaking. When you think about it, how often do you get a window into a grieving seven year-old? Though the book is fiction, it has the vividness of an autobiography. Amid the complication, the arguing, and the desperation among them all, love is present: it is clear and pervasive and strong, and nothing short of miraculous. While this poor child is swallowed by fear, she loves her brothers. And they love her. Grief is a lifelong plague- but the love she has for her family is continually extricating her from it, even into adulthood. Its a fascinating look at time. It is fascinating to see what she carries with her- because its all the right stuff. As a younger sister, as a victim of parental loss, as someone who is seeking to define herself as an adult in the face of grief, and as someone who has a family (albeit a broken one) I found this book to be enormously powerful, perhaps because it is so relevant. But the writing is simple and beautiful. It is a stunning portrait of familial love (we take its potency for granted.) The story is phenomenally complex but equally simple. Love simplifies things. By the end of the book I was struck dumb, totally overcome with one truth the story brought to light: No love is ordinary.
This author's work I have read quite out of order. But I liked this one much better than "Road Ends". It's 4.5 star level in its characterizations all around. Yes, my favorite of this Northern Ontario locale of hers that I have read. We know 3 or 4 families well at Crow Lake this time, but we know the narrator's family the most deeply. Smart people, and some like Matt are still their own worst enemies in the anxiety their smarts seem to inflame about their future. Kate is not my favorite class of narrator/protagonist (rather a whiner and selfish to the bone core), but we are lead to an understanding of what it looks like from her perspective. Luke was drawn so well, and Bo was captured in words just superbly. This isn't a happy tale, and there are multiple types of dysfunction and suffering. And yet this book was not a downer over all. There were two or three people that kept it from being far more than just a conceited tale of "how I made good while the others blew it" junket that you get all the time now in the moderns. As if financial success and educational superiority tips all the scales for self-satisfaction. I loved the way this one ended, with some realizations to rock the insular reserve. There was much to think about after reading this book. Especially about what neighbors mean to people in different places and different time periods. I would like to discuss this one in a book group with Returning Adult program college students with a medium age of 48-52, or in that category of schooling, even if not in the older bunches. Because there are some assumptions about schooling and intellect and intelligent pursuits here, from that time or any time period, that are realistically way off.
What do You think about Crow Lake (2003)?
First novels are tough. Many haven't mastered the art of "show, don't tell" in their story-telling. Mary Lawson does a beautiful job of getting you to feel the emotions of the characters and their varying reactions to the tragedy that occurs near the beginning of the book. This is especially hard, since the setting is a small farming community where you are not supposed to show your emotions. You are supposed to be stoic in face of anything and everything, although stoicism can easily lead to feelings of martyrdom.Perhaps this novel captivated me, because I grew up in a household where words of anger were not spoken, but certainly the anger was there. She described very well what it's like to swallow that anger and keep it down throughout your life.The ending is quiet, and will disappoint those who want some large explosive fanfare ending. But I found it very intense, even it its quiet realization. It's a fairly quick read and will be of interest to those who like to know what makes people tick.
—Lisa
Book #26 of 2009Back to the serious side of things I guess... I've been chewing on this book for a couple of days now, never being really invested in it to make a big to finishing it, certainly not devouring it like the last five books or so. I'm not even really sure how I feel about it. Its almost anticlimatic in a way. The whole book builds up to this supposedly huge catastrophe, which isn't really a catastrophe at all, but a decision moving life one way instead of another. But the supposed catastrophe isn't even really the point of the book, it's the narrator's view of said catastrophe that is really the purpose of the book it seems, and the climax is such a small mental shift in the way she looks at "the catastrophe". The narrator herself isn't really an overly likeable character in my opinion. When she talks about her younger self she just seems so selfish. But then again, she was a kid so I guess that is to be expected. And when she talks about her adult self, she seems so aloof, emotionally univnested in much of anything.
—Amanda
3.5 starsSpare and somber (but not overly so), Mary Lawson's Crow Lake is evocative of Carol Shields' Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Stone Diaries but (to its credit) isn't quite as overladen with flowery prose (or twee cutesiness). Both novels are set in rural Canada (Crow Lake in the northern-most inhabited reaches of Ontario, Stone Diaries in stone quarry-filled central Manitoba); both feature a female narrator whistfully looking back on their hardscrabble rural pasts. In the right melancholic frame of mind, I enjoyed both of these, but Crow Lake ultimately wins out with a more relatable story.Kate Morrison, twenty-eight year-old environmental biology professor at an unnamed (but probably Toronto-based) university, reminisces about her life in Crow Lake, a sugar beet farming community with little more than a schoolhouse, a general store, and a Presbyterian church to barely mark it on the map. She focues back to when she was eight years-old, on the two years following the tragic deaths of her parents, and how she and her three siblings (two much older teen brothers Matt and Luke, and infant sister Bo) try to keep what remains of their family together. The Morrison family, despite living in a farming community that prioritized (by necessity) crop returns for survival's sake, valued education above all. So the elder Morrison boys, university-bound, are faced with the decision of either shelving their academic dreams (and working the fields, an Herculean task when you've got two young siblings to take care of) or submitting to the wishes of distant family willing to take them in (but in doing so breaking up the sibling bonds that tie them together.)This is not a particularly splashy novel, but it is quietly affecting, and not nearly as depressing as the jacket info led meto imagine. I believe this was Ms. Lawson's first novel; I'd like to visit her more recent works as I'm plenty certain she's got more lovely stories of rural Ontario life and family to share with us.
—Snotchocheez
