{"product_id":"crow-lake-isbn-9780385337632","title":"Crow Lake","description":"\u003cb\u003eCrow Lake\u003c\/b\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHere is a gorgeous, slow-burning story set in the rural “badlands” of northern Ontario, where heartbreak and hardship are mirrored in the landscape. For the farming Pye family, life is a Greek tragedy where the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons, and terrible events occur—offstage. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCenterstage are the Morrisons, whose tragedy looks more immediate if less brutal, but is, in reality, insidious and divisive. Orphaned young, Kate Morrison was her older brother Matt’s protegee, her fascination for pond life fed by his passionate interest in the natural world. Now a zoologist, she can identify organisms under a microscope but seems blind to the state of her own emotional life. And she thinks she’s outgrown her siblings—Luke, Matt, and Bo—who were once her entire world. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 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, \u003cb\u003eCrow Lake\u003c\/b\u003e is a quiet tour de force that will catapult Mary Lawson to the forefront of fiction writers today.\"A finely crafted debut ... conveys an astonishing intensity of emotion, almost Proustian in its sense of loss and regret.\"—\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews, starred review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e“The assurance with which Mary Lawson handles both reflection and violence makes her a writer to read and watch … has a resonance at once witty and poignant.”—\u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“\u003cb\u003eCrow Lake\u003c\/b\u003e is the kind of book that keeps you reading well past midnight; you grieve when it’s over. Then you start pressing it on friends.”—\u003ci\u003eWashington Post Book World\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“A touching meditation on the power of loyalty and loss, on the ways in which we pay our debts and settle old scores, and on what it means to love, to accept, to succeed—and to negotiate fate’s obstacle courses.”—\u003ci\u003ePeople\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Lawson’s tight focus on the emotional and moral effects of a drastic turn of events on a small human group has its closest contemporary analogue in the novels of Ian McEwan.”—\u003ci\u003eToronto Star\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eMary Lawson was born and brought up in a farming community in Ontario. After graduating from McGill University she went to England for a holiday and stayed on; she lives there still, with her husband and sons, though she returns to Canada every year.\u003ci\u003ePrologue\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy great-grandmother Morrison fixed a book rest to her spinning wheel so that she could read while she was spinning, or so the story goes. And one Saturday evening she became so absorbed in her book that when she looked up, she found that it was half past midnight and she had spun for half an hour on the Sabbath day. Back then, that counted as a major sin.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003em not recounting that little bit of family lore just for the sake of it. I\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003eve come to the conclusion recently that Great-Grandmother and her book rest have a lot to answer for. She\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003ed been dead for decades by the time the events occurred that devastated our family and put an end to our dreams, but that doesn\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003et mean she had no influence over the final outcome. What took place between Matt and me can\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003et be explained without reference to Great-Grandmother. It\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003es only fair that some of the blame should be laid at her door.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere was a picture of her in my parents\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003e room while I was growing up. I used to stand in front of it, as a very small child, daring myself to meet her eyes. She was small, tight-lipped, and straight, dressed in black with a white lace collar (scrubbed ruthlessly, no doubt, every single evening and ironed before dawn each day). She looked severe, disapproving, and entirely without humor. And well she might; she had fourteen children in thirteen years and five hundred acres of barren farmland on the Gaspe Peninsula. How she found time to spin, let alone read, I\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003ell never know.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOf the four of us, Luke, Matt, Bo, and I, Matt was the only one who resembled her at all. He was far from grim, but he had the same straight mouth and steady gray eyes. If I fidgeted in church and got a sharp glance from my mother, I would peer sideways up at Matt to see if he had noticed. And he always had, and looked severe, and then at the last possible moment, just as I was beginning to despair, he would wink.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMatt was ten years older than I, tall and serious and clever. His great passion was the ponds, a mile or two away across the railroad tracks. They were old gravel pits, abandoned years ago after the road was built, and filled by nature with all manner of marvelous wriggling creatures. When Matt first started taking me back to the ponds I was so small he had to carry me on his shoulders through the woods with their luxuriant growth of poison ivy, along the tracks, past the dusty boxcars lined up to receive their loads of sugar beets, down the steep sandy path to the ponds themselves. There we would lie on our bellies while the sun beat down on our backs, gazing into the dark water, waiting to see what we would see.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere is no image of my childhood that I carry with me more clearly than that; a boy of perhaps fifteen or sixteen, fair-haired and lanky; beside him a little girl, fairer still, her hair drawn back in braids, her thin legs burning brown in the sun. They are both lying perfectly still, chins resting on the backs of their hands. He is showing her things. Or rather, things are drifting out from under rocks and shadows and showing themselves, and he is telling her about them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e“\u003c\/i\u003eJust move your finger, Kate. Waggle it in the water. He\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003ell come over. He can\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003et resist.\u003ci\u003e”\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCautiously the little girl waggles her finger; cautiously a small snapping turtle slides over to investigate.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e“\u003c\/i\u003eSee? They\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003ere very curious when they\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003ere young. When he gets older, though, he\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003ell be suspicious and bad-tempered.\u003ci\u003e”\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e“\u003c\/i\u003eWhy?\u003ci\u003e”\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe old snapper they had trapped out on land once had looked sleepy rather than suspicious. He\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003ed had a wrinkled, rubbery head, and she had wanted to pat it. Matt held out a branch as thick as his thumb and the snapper chopped it in two.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e“\u003c\/i\u003eTheir shells are small for the size of their bodies\u003ci\u003e, \u003c\/i\u003esmaller than most turtles\u003ci\u003e, \u003c\/i\u003eso a lot of their skin is exposed. It makes them nervous.\u003ci\u003e”\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe little girl nods, and the ends of her braids bob up and down in the water, making tiny ripples which tremble out across the surface of the pond. She is completely absorbed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHundreds of hours, we must have spent that way over the years. I came to know the tadpoles of the leopard frogs, the fat gray tadpoles of the bullfrogs, the tiny black wriggling ones of toads. I knew the turtles and the catfish, the water striders and the newts, the whirligigs spinning hysterically over the surface of the water. Hundreds of hours, while the seasons changed and the pond life died and renewed itself many times, and I grew too big to ride on Matt\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003es shoulders and instead picked my way through the woods behind him. I was unaware of these changes of course\u003ci\u003e, \u003c\/i\u003ethey happened so gradually, and children have very little concept of time. Tomorrow is forever, and years pass in no time at all.\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003eChapter One\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen the end came, it seemed to do so completely out of the blue, and it wasn\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003et until long afterward that I was able to see that there was a chain of events leading up to it. Some of those events had nothing to do with us, the Morrisons, but were solely the concern of the Pyes, who lived on a farm about a mile away and were our nearest neighbors. The Pyes were what you\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003ed call a problem family, always had been, always would be, but that year, within the privacy of their big old gray-painted farmhouse\u003ci\u003e, \u003c\/i\u003eoffstage as far as the rest of the community was concerned\u003ci\u003e, \u003c\/i\u003etheir problems were developing into a full-scale nightmare. The other thing we didn\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003et know was that the Pye nightmare was destined to become entangled with the Morrison dream. Nobody could have predicted that.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003es no end to how far back you can go, of course, when you\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003ere trying to figure out where something started. The search can take you back to Adam and beyond. But for our family there was an event that summer catastrophic enough to be the start of practically anything. It took place on a hot, still Saturday in July when I was seven years old, and brought normal family life to an end; even now, almost twenty years later, I find it hard to get any sort of perspective on it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe only positive thing you can say about it is that at least everything ended on a high note, because the previous day\u003ci\u003e, \u003c\/i\u003eour last day together as a family\u003ci\u003e, \u003c\/i\u003emy parents had learned that Luke, my \u003ci\u003e“\u003c\/i\u003eother\u003ci\u003e”\u003c\/i\u003e brother\u003ci\u003e, \u003c\/i\u003eother than Matt\u003ci\u003e, \u003c\/i\u003ehad passed his senior matriculation and won a place at teachers college. Luke\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003es success was something of a surprise because, to put it mildly, he was not a scholar. I remember reading somewhere a theory to the effect that each member of a family has a role\u003ci\u003e, ”\u003c\/i\u003ethe clever one,\u003ci\u003e”\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003e“\u003c\/i\u003ethe pretty one,\u003ci\u003e”\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003e“\u003c\/i\u003ethe selfish one.\u003ci\u003e”\u003c\/i\u003e Once you\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003eve been established in the role for a while, you\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003ere stuck with it\u003ci\u003e, \u003c\/i\u003eno matter what you do, people will still see you as whatever-it-was\u003ci\u003e, \u003c\/i\u003ebut in the early stages, according to the theory, you have some choice as to what your role will be. If that\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003es the case, then early on in life Luke must have decided that what he really wanted to be was \u003ci\u003e“\u003c\/i\u003ethe problem one.\u003ci\u003e”\u003c\/i\u003e I don\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003et know what influenced his choice, but it\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003es possible that he\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003ed heard the story of Great-Grandmother and her famous book rest once too often. That story must have been the bane of Luke\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003es life. Or one of the banes\u003ci\u003e, \u003c\/i\u003ethe other would have been having Matt as a brother. Matt was so obviously Great-Grandmother\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003es true intellectual heir that there was no point in Luke even trying. Better, then, to find what he was naturally good at\u003ci\u003e, \u003c\/i\u003eraising our parents\u003ci\u003e’\u003c\/i\u003e blood pressure, say\u003ci\u003e, \u003c\/i\u003eand practice, practice, practice.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut somehow, in spite of himself, here he was at the age of nineteen having passed his exams. After three generations of striving, a member of the Morrison family was about to go on to higher education.","brand":"Dial Press Trade Paperback","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303406850277,"sku":"NP9780385337632","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780385337632.jpg?v=1767724296","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/crow-lake-isbn-9780385337632","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}