Crow Lake is a 2002 first written by author Mary Lawson.
It won the Books in Canada First Novel Award in the same year and won the Mckitterick Prize in 2003. It is
set in a small farming community, Northern Ontario the Crow Lake of the title, and centers on the Morrison family
(Kate the narrator, her younger sister Bo and older brothers Matt and Luke) and
the events following the death of their parents. Kate's childhood story of the
first year after their parents' death is intertwined with the story of Kate as
an adult, now a successful young academic and planning a future with her
partner, Daniel, but haunted by the events of the past. In among the narratives
are set cameos of rural life in Northern Ontario, and of the farming families
of the region.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crow_Lake_(novel)
This book tackles about the family of Morissons they are very close but things happened unexpectedly.
They became broken family by the death of their parents. The dream of one member of the family is the cause of the death of the parents.
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 these are the main theme of the novel.
When I read this novel all I remember is that the story is somewhat the same with my life story. That is why I really love this book because it tells us that the past will never let go when something happen that is very important to you. Below is the plot of the story
The death of their parents, when Kate
is 7 years old, Bo a toddler, and her brothers in their late teens, threatens
the family with dispersal and seems to spell the end of their parents' dream
that they should all have a college education. Luke, the oldest but not the
most academic, gives up a place at a teachers college in order to look after
the two youngest and allow Matt, academically brilliant and idolized by Kate,
to complete his schooling and compete for university scholarships.
This sacrifice
leads to much tension between the brothers. Both work intermittently for a neighboring
family, the Pyes, who for several generations have suffered from fierce
conflicts between fathers and sons. In the final crisis, Matt, after winning
his scholarships, discovers that he has made the meek and distressed daughter
of the Pye household, Marie, pregnant; she also reveals that her father, Calvin
Pye, has killed her brother, who was thought to have run away from home as
several other Pye sons had done. Calvin Pye kills himself, and Matt has to give
up his plans for education to marry Marie.
Kate sees the
loss of Matt's potential academic career as a terrible sacrifice, and is unable
to come to terms with Marie or Matt thereafter. The denouement of the adult
Kate's story comes when she returns to Crow Lake for Matt and Marie's son's
eighteenth birthday, introducing Daniel to her family for the first time. In
the course of this visit, she is made to realize - first by Marie and then by
Daniel - that Matt's loss though real was not the total tragedy she had always
considered it, and that it is her sense of it as tragic that has destroyed her
relationship with him. The book ends with her struggling to come to terms with
this view of their past and present relationships; the struggle is left
unresolved but the final tone is optimistic.
The book is
essentially a double Bildungsroman,
in that the development of both Matt and Kate is charted; but whereas we see
the key events in Matt's young adulthood more or less in sequence, the key
events in Kate's are sketched in from both ends, towards a crisis that in terms
of events is Matt's but psychologically is more significant for Kate. The
mixture of perspectives involved in Kate's story allows the author to relate
violent events and highly charged emotions in a smooth and elegant style, a
quality for which the book has been widely praised by reviewers.
