November 10th, 2022, saw the Book Club gather at the Fairfield Seniors’ Centre (at 2:00 p.m. in Room 3) to discuss Crow Lake by Mary Lawson. Our animated discussion was led by our new President, Debra Owens. Everyone enjoyed reading her suggestion.
Crow Lake by Mary Lawson (293 pages)
Who doesn’t love Mary Lawson? Even though this, her first novel, was published in 2002 when Lawson was 55, it reached critical acclaim and was sold in 28 countries. It then spent 75 weeks on the bestseller list in Canada, won the Amazon.ca ‘First Novel Award’, was a New York Times bestseller, and was chosen as ‘Book of the Year’ by the New York Times, The Sunday Times, The Washington Post and The Globe and Mail.
Even though Mary was born and grew up near Sarnia, Ontario and summered in the Northern Ontario Canadian Shield, she had been living in England for more than 20 years before she penned her first novel. She set Crow Lake in northern Ontario to remind her of her great grandmother, on whom this book was based, and her family’s history. She loved her memories of her summers and wrote them into her novels.
This debut novel is a shimmering tale of love, death and redemption for four recently orphaned children being raised by the oldest child, Luke, aged 18. As descendants of a great-grandmother who “fixed a book rest to her spinning wheel so that she could read while she was spinning,” the Morrison children had some hope of getting off the land through the blessing of education. Luke turned down the scholarship he had won to higher education to look after his siblings.
In this family bound together by loss, the closest relationship is between Kate and her older brother Matt, who teaches his little sister Kate to watch “damselflies performing their delicate iridescent dances,” and to understand how water beetles “carry down an air bubble with them when they submerge” in their ponds. Matt becomes Kate’s hero and her guide, as his passionate interest in the natural world sparks an equal passion in Kate who is brilliant in her own rite. So, it is Kate who eventually earns a doctorate and a university teaching position. She is never able to reconcile her success with her terrible guilt over the sacrifices made for her.
In this universal drama of family love and misunderstandings, Lawson ratchets up the tension within Kate and her relationship with her siblings. There is an unexpected turn in her thinking after 18 years, that now allows her to re-establish her lost feelings of love for her family and to give up on her guilt.
If you read this novel and love Mary Lawson as our Book Club did, she has penned many more books available via our Toronto Public Library System. Enjoy those you choose to read!
Probus Club of Kingsway-Islington 