Crow Lake

Crow Lake

Mary Lawson
Dial, 2002

When Kate was only seven years old, her parents were killed in a car accident in rural Ontario. Her oldest brother Luke had just graduated high school, and the family was planning on his attendance at a teacher’s college. Another brother Matt was just 17, and the baby of the family, Bo, was just 1 year old. Now Kate is an adult, albeit a wounded one, who teaches zoology at a Canadian University and mulls the choices that were made long ago, when she was just a child and didn’t understand the trials her older brothers were undertaking in order to keep the family together.

Matt’s son is celebrating his 18th birthday, and Kate has been invited to a party that will also serve as a family reunion of sorts. Daniel is her significant other, an only child who had a very different upbringing that Kate did. In fact, while Kate has met Daniel’s parents, she has shared very little of her past with Daniel, which has caused a rift between them. Feeling pressure when he learns about the party, she invites him to the family farm, and the subsequent worry and concern over his reaction to her family causes her to revisit the events of her parent’s deaths and the subsequent sacrifices her older brothers made on her behalf – something which has haunted her and caused her immeasurable guilt ever since.

This quiet and unassuming book packs quite an emotional wallop. Lawson’s descriptions can’t help but draw the reader into a world of a remote and barren landscape housing multiple characters with so much personality that they jump out from the pages. Quiet and thoughtful writing definitely does not mean boring in this situation, because the tension builds through each chapter as the reader is teased with some event that changes the course of brother’s Matt’s plans and, indeed, causes Kate to be burdened with the guilt she has struggled with ever since. I could hardly put this book down and enjoyed every minute of it.

Rating:

This is the author’s first novel.

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