Once in a rare while a work of fiction is published with an astonishing range and a compelling story line--a veritable treasure--that you want everyone to read it.
Crow Lake is such a book. It has everything: love, hate, friendship, intellectual stimulation, biology, the ties that bind families together and what rips them apart, self-sacrifice, grief and redemption.
This is an opus masquerading as a simple story, the author is in complete control, there isn't a false note and the reader, mesmerized, does not want this insightful book to end. Kate Morrison, the adult narrator, now a university professor of biology, reflects on the fateful summer when she was seven and orphaned in a small farming town in Northern Ontario.
Her parents drive to town to pick a suitcase for Luke her oldest brother, 19, who has just won a scholarship for teacher training in Toronto and are killed in a car accident. Younger and brilliant brother Matt, 17, takes after great grandma Morrison, who loved reading, sinned because she was so absorbed in her books resting on the spinning wheel she read into the Sabbath.
The descriptions of Bo, 18 months, sagging diapers, banging on pots and pans, sucking her thumb and holding on to Luke she is so enchanting, have the power to break your heart. Luke gives up his dream of school so the family can stay together. The community rallies to help-they do unobtrusively and without fanfare-and the Morrisons' actually make a go of it. Lawson is adept at picking the nuances of family life-the older boys protecting their younger sisters and caring for them. The rivalry between the brothers is compelling. Lawson weaves her story with consummate skill and the choices the brothers make reverberate and haunt them throughout their lives.
Discriminating readers who enjoy an intellectual challenge will find this riveting book a particular pleasure.
