Crow Lake: FROM THE BOOKER PRIZE LONGLISTED AUTHOR OF A TOWN CALLED SOLACE

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Immediately I love the writing. Each line is loaded with subtle humor. The theme, and why you might be interested? Who doesn't connect with the competing emotions between one sibling and another and parents' preferences for one child over another? After the death of her alcoholic and neglectful mother, Chrysalis (sorry - I didn't choose the name) doesn't eat and barely comes out from under her bed in the derelict California mansion she and her brother grew up in and have inherited, even when her adored brother Eddie comes home. He brings with him an equally attractive fellow of like age (thirtyish), Ralph, with whom Chrysalis instantly falls in love. Was Matt doomed to let Kate down in some way? Do you think it' possible for any young man to live up to such heroic expectations? Why? This novel opens our thinking and hearts - for sure- when disappointments happen, when the rug is pulled out from under us, and we bump up against ourselves (our own worse enemy) A. The honest answer is, I don’t know. The novel came from a short story, and the short story came from a single sentence, which came into my mind one morning without explanation and out of nowhere. It was, ‘My great grandmother fixed a book-rest to her spinning wheel so that she could read while she was spinning.’

Where to start reading Mary Lawson - Penguin Books UK Where to start reading Mary Lawson - Penguin Books UK

This sacrifice leads to much tension between the brothers. Both work intermittently for a neighbouring family, the Pyes, who for several generations have suffered from fierce conflicts between fathers and sons. In the final crisis, Matt, after winning his scholarships, discovers that he has made the meek and distressed daughter of the Pye household, Marie, pregnant; she also reveals that her father, Calvin Pye, has killed her brother, who was thought to have run away from home as several other Pye sons had done. Calvin Pye kills himself, and Matt has to give up his plans for education to marry Marie.In Crow Lake, the narrator, Kate, quite consciously examines how much of the dire events affecting her family are a result of character, how much of circumstance and how circumstance shapes character. This assured, lucid narrative, less literary but still full of blossoming insights and emotional acuity, takes you into a family in northern Ontario. The father is the first of his farming clan to have finished secondary school; his job in a bank has justified the sacrifices made to get him there. Crow Lake plays out the tensions between two fundamental elements of the Canadian psyche: ties to the land and faith in education. Lawson emphasizes the land’s destructive power, especially in the unforgiving climate of northern Ontario. Held out as a gift and a promise, for many the land has been only a bitter burden, dragging down successive generations. Delivery lies in education, for the Morrisons symbolized by a great-grandmother who believed so strongly in learning that she nailed a bookstand to her spinning wheel. As a consequence of the events of her childhood, Kate is a rather judgmental, withdrawn young woman. Nevertheless, Daniel falls in love with her. What do you think he sees in her, under her protective shell?

Crow Lake by Mary Lawson | Waterstones

some of the characters weren't as fully fleshed-out as i would have liked, but on the whole, that did not have adverse affects. my biggest issue was that i figured out one of the revelations too early, so when it was finally written out, i wasn't surprised, more annoyed that it occurred exactly as i had deduced. Orphaned young, Kate Morrison and her siblings were bound together by loss. None of them could have expected the tumultuous times ahead—least of all Kate’s older brothers, Matt and Luke. Twenty years later, the sacrifices they made and the promises they broke would continue to reverberate through their lives and the quiet rural community of Crow Lake.She also has a glamorous best friend who has a sexy boyfriend who, it turns out, through an ingeniously arranged sequence of inadvertently divulged information and a recovered earring, Clare once slept with and forgot. The man did not forget. Poetry, indeed. Mary Lawson is a treasure, a new voice maturing into her gift in mid-life. A younger writer never would have caught all these nuances. Let us rejoice in the discovery of this subtle, graceful, late-blooming talent. | June 2002 But such are the vagaries of the publishing biz. The important thing is that someone finally gave the 55-year-old Lawson a break, so that we now get to enjoy a heart-tuggingly beautiful piece of work by an author who clearly knows what she is doing. Strange, the way the mind works. The way it protects itself from things that cannot face. Grief, for instance. Or regret. Guilt. It finds something else, anything, to draw between it and what cannot be looked at”.