Mary lawson crow lake biography of william
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CURRENTLY READING
At the end of my introductory post to the Canadian Book Challenge I asked for recommendations and pburt mentioned how much she liked Mary Lawson’s books. That’s how inom decided to read The Other Side of the Bridge.
We cannot experience everything in our life. Especially not the past, nor a way of life which fryst vatten very different from our own. Luckily one of the many functions of literature fryst vatten to help us experience other times and places. Reading this novel makes it possible to travel back in time, to a place and a way of life long gone; rural Ontario between 1930 to 196o, a harsh inhospitable place which drives strangers and ung people away.
The novel tells two parallel but linked stories and moves back and forth in time. It starts in the 30s with the story of the brothers Arthur and Jake. Arthur fryst vatten the reliable one. Stocky and solid. He wants to become a farmer just like his father. Jake who is much younger, fryst vatten the good-looking one, the favourite of h
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Lawson, Mary: Crow Lake
Lawson, Mary
Crow Lake
Knopf Canada, 2002
294 pages; hardcover
First published in The Haliburton County Echo, County Life
Summer, 2002
Review by: Kerry Riley
Successful passage from childhood to maturity requires, at some point, a thoughtful reassessment by the adult individual of what are often sharply emotional and deeply held positions, forged in childhood by an immature consciousness but still casting widespread influence in later life. Fine and good. Understood. But how, I ask you, can one be expected to accomplish such a feat if one is…Presbyterian???!!! Or, in a more general sense, if one can make any claim to a WASP heritage and sensibility?
A frivolous question, one might think, but it is, in fact, the central concern of Mary Lawson’s accomplished first novel, Crow Lake, and she is very right to ask it. Idealistic and intensely loyal, practical, low-maintenance to the point of aloofness, and wryly humorous by nature, WASPS
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Reader, I am distraught. I have read all the Mary Lawson novels there are to read – which, admittedly, is only four. Given that there are usually long gaps between them, it will probably be a while before I get another in my hands – but I can always reread. And I’m sure I’ll be rereading Road Ends (2013) several times. Unsurprisingly, it’s simply brilliant.
I bought it in a sale at Vancouver Public Library and read it on the plane between Vancouver and Toronto – what a great book for a plane ride, as it totally captivated me for the full four hours.
Like all of Lawson’s novels, the action of Road Ends takes place in northern Ontario – near the fictional town of Struan, and by a tiny community called Road Ends. She takes us further afield than other of her novels, as I’ll get to in a bit. But it starts in the middle of nowhere in 1967 – a short chapter where two young men Simon and Tom (Simon Thomas! me!) are witness