Crow Lake
Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 31 secondsCrow Lake by Mary Lawson is set in northern Ontario’s rural “badlands.” The badlands are where heartbreak and hardship are mirrored in the landscape of the farming Pye family. Crow Lake is that rare find, a first novel so quietly assured, so emotionally pitch-perfect, you know from the opening page that this is the real thing – a literary experience in which to lose yourself, by an author of immense talent.
Crow Lake was a page-turner for me once I read the prologue.
Two families dominate the story.
On the one hand, it is the Greek tragedy of the Pye family. On their farm, “the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons, and terrible events occur—offstage.”
Kate Morrison has left her two brothers and sister at the lake to become a zoologist. The four siblings lost their parents and struggled to remain together. Their “tragedy looks more immediate if less brutal, but is, in reality, insidious and divisive.”
As Goodreads describes the novel,
In this universal drama of family love and misunderstandings, of resentments harbored and driven underground, Lawson ratchets up the tension with heartbreaking humor and consummate control, continually overturning one’s expectations right to the very end. Tragic, funny, unforgettable, this deceptively simple masterpiece about the perils of hero worship leaped to the top of the bestseller lists only days after being released in Canada and earned glowing reviews in The New York Times and The Globe and Mail, to name a few.
I highly recommend this novel and am looking forward to reading more from Mary Lawson.
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