January 5, 2012
4.5 This is a beautiful, rich novel marbled with huge swaths of sadness, set in a town in the open spaces of northern Ontario. It is so simple, and yet so richly layered, that I have trouble describing it: it's about a family, as well as some other families in their small town. There is a traumatic event - really a number of them. The families go on. The narrator, a member of the central family, is looking back at these events, which are interwoven with scenes from the present. My More...

This is very cleanly written, so it's a fast read. Just a good simple story about 4 children who lose their parents in a car accident and the struggles they go through to stay together as a family. The narrator looks back on how the choices each of them made altered their own lives as well as the lives of their siblings.
I've been reading a lot of emotionally wrenching stuff lately, so this was a nice calm read for a change!
I liked her second novel (The Other Side of the Bridge) a little better More...

I chose this book for our June book club. It was a “Today Show” book choice. Told from the perspective of 27 year old Kate, the story is one of sadness (her parents died in a car crash 20 years earlier), forgiveness, guilt and growth. I enjoyed the story and especially the flaws that Kate has as a character and person. As a reader it was rewarding to witness her evolution as a character throughout the narrative. Our book club had some good discussion and most (though not all) liked the book. Mos More...

Me derrumbo ante a la vez cruel y enternecedora historia de cómo unos niños deciden valerse por sí mismos ante la pérdida de sus padres. De cómo la ingenuidad de mantener la unidad debe hacer frente a las mil penurias que implica su aislada situación, y sin permitir que los sentimientos de unidad dejen de primar ante todo.
Una pregunta importante "¿Seremos capaces de hacerlo solos?"" y una enseñanza vital como respuesta.
Lleno de entusiasmo, constituye para mí otra de las lecturas que jamás olvida More...

Book #26 of 2009
Back to the serious side of things I guess... I've been chewing on this book for a couple of days now, never being really invested in it to make a big to finishing it, certainly not devouring it like the last five books or so. I'm not even really sure how I feel about it. Its almost anticlimatic in a way. The whole book builds up to this supposedly huge catastrophe, which isn't really a catastrophe at all, but a decision moving life one way instead of another. But the supposed ca More...

First novels are tough. Many haven't mastered the art of "show, don't tell" in their story-telling. Mary Lawson does a beautiful job of getting you to feel the emotions of the characters and their varying reactions to the tragedy that occurs near the beginning of the book. This is especially hard, since the setting is a small farming community where you are not supposed to show your emotions. You are supposed to be stoic in face of anything and everything, although stoicism can easily lead to fe More...

7-year old Kate's rural Ontario family is a strict Protestant one where emotional displays are unseemly, hard work and education highly valued. Her two, much older, brothers do not get along. It is the younger one, Matt, who regularly takes Kate to the nearby ponds to observe and learn about the creatures there, sparking a passionate interest that leads to her profession, later, as scientist. But it is both brothers, when their parents are suddenly killed, who work hard and sacrifice much to hol More...

Mary Lawson was fifty-five when this, her first novel, was published. Born in Canada and having lived in the UK for a long time, she chose to set the novel in a fictionalised part of North Ontario.

I have an image of myself lying awake, staring at the darkness. I kept trying to sleep and sleep would not come and time would not pass. I knew that Luke and Matt were awake too but for some reason I was afraid to talk to them, so the night went on for ever.

Other things seemed to happen over and over b

More...

I picked up this novel from the small shelf dedicated to BookCrossing books near Humus, the café in the Humanities Dept. of my uni. There were no expectations involved; the back cover included the usual praise and the synopsis did not waken any special interest. I just thought it might be worth a try.

Crow Lake is deserving of every praise printed on its covers. I am not kidding. I was hooked pretty much from the start, and had I had the chance to do so, I probably would have devoured it in one d More...

This book has been sitting on my shelf, unread, for many years. I wish I'd left it there. While this is Mary Lawson's first book, my sympathy is limited. She offers no depth to her characters. You develop no bonds with anyone in the book. It has a poorly assembled storyline which is supposed to develop into an emotional epiphany for the flat protagonist "Kate"; however, by the end of the book, Kate has learned almost nothing about herself and, what she has "learned", was not picked up by her aft More...

I liked this book very much for a number of reasons.
First, because the minute I started reading it, I identified with the writing style. The sentence structures, the choice of words, everything about it seemed so familiar. I felt like this was a book I could have written. Secondly, right from the get-go I was really intrigued. I am a sucker for the "Little did we know..." way of drawing the reader in. This was very well done in this novel. Throughout the story, I could never guess just what wou More...

four children (19, 17, 7, and 2) are orphaned when their parents are in a tragic car accident, but the children pull together and the older two sons raise the younger two girls. I very much enjoyed the depiction of family life and it felt very familiar to me to read of a large family where the oldest children pulled a large share of the child-rearing and all had to pull together to "make it" and stay together. The second son and the 7-year-old girl have a particularly close relationship over a s More...

After their parents were killed in an accident, Luke and Matt take on the responsibility of raising their two younger sisters, Kate and Bo. Set in the remote areas of Canada, where everyone knows everyone else yet secrets may be kept for years, expressing emotion is difficult and as hard as the frozen winters of Crow Lake. Raised to believe that getting an education is the most important goal, Kate, the narrator of the book, must come to grips with the fact that one can learn to live happily in More...

Crow Lake is an interesting novel on many levels. It has beautiful descriptions of the land in northern Ontario, a tragedy that occurs in the beginning of the novel, obstacles to overcome by family members and a dire mystery that is alluded to from early on. What is it then that disappoints me? I guess for me, I never became involved with the central character Kate. She is unemotional, detached and academic. She resists facing her past, by refusing to become involved in her current relationships More...

It's a strange thing that I came across this book. I found it wedged into the back of a shelf downstairs. It seems I read it at the perfect time. It came to me in the midst of serious, physical grief, the kind where your body is taken over by sadness and is simply a vessel for your shaking and sobbing and wailing. Oh the wailing. You will wail. And not in the Wayne's World sense. Its the kind of thing that you can't let anyone else listen to, because what the wailing is is the pain leaving your More...

My roommate means well but boy does she have bland taste in "literature" and yes I say "literature" with as much sarcasm as possible. Believe me I turn down more offerings of hers than I read, but I just feel obligated to choke one or two down every once in a while.

I wanted to like it, I did. I just didn't. It just didn't feel "new" to me. And I didn't find the writing style especially evocative. The narrator of the story speaks and thinks like a 50+-year-old, and I kept shaking my head to clea More...

I couldn't put this book down until I finished @ 3:30 a.m. It's been a while since I have done that but I'd have to say Crow Lake was worth it.

The narrator, Kate, is a 27 year old biologist with a very successful career. But that career does not fully satisfy her because she has loose ends to tidy up with her siblings. It's something that she would rather postpone indefinitely, but circumstances force her to sort through the emotional baggage. Her story builds to a satisfactory conclusion and sh More...

a fabulous read, beautifully written with vivid characters. It's a short, easy read but I found myself very moved by the representation of the Morrison family. This novel is never overly sentimental or gushing - it's one which will stay with me for a long time and whose characters I will remember fondly - something which doesn't happen that often to me!

Since there isn't the option to give 4.5, I've given it 5, only because I'm probably too harsh at times....

I would have given this book 5 stars if not for the ending. I didn't mind the ending, but I minded the pacing. It just stopped. The protagonist was supposed to have this earth-shattering epiphany, and she skims the surface of it, and then the author wraps it up and calls it a day. All within 5 pages. It was a let down.

That being said, I loved the story, the characters, and the conflict. I found the writing rich and rewarding as well as the unique setting of Northern Canada. I was especially take More...

This book sucked me right in. I started reading it late last night, around 1:30 a.m., and put it down about an hour later, only because I knew I had to get some sleep so I wouldn't look/feel like an extra from The Walking Dead.

The story is narrated by Kate, who now an adult. She was raised in a small Northern Ontario town, the titular Crow Lake. Her parents were killed in a logging truck accident when she was 7 years old, and she and her siblings are dealing with the aftermath of that tragedy.

I More...

This novel is very much like consuming several empty calories: so much to read, not a lot to comprehend. This novel went on, and on, and on. I found a lot of the information given about Katie's past overly descriptive. Far too much irrelevant detail! I also found the book to be quite repetitive, I don't know how many times it was mentioned that the neighbors were dropping off meals. I don't know how many uncomfortable dinner table conversations there were. I don't know how many chapters were ded More...

Love it so far. Lawson is a great storyteller.

I agree with some of the review that there was, at times, quite a bit of redundancy. I'm okay with that. I think the best of this book is that the author is able to capture the selfishness of children with honesty. Lawson does many things right in this book including showing how our beliefs make us act in ways that don't necessarily match the circumstance. I vacillate between giving this book five stars and three stars. If you come from a dysfunctional family (I guess most of us do) you may find More...

Crow Lake is a simply told story that encompasses self-sufficiency, sacrifice and survival. Like, Camilla Gibb’s Sweetness in the Belly, Mary Lawson’s novel is a joy to read and confirms that Canadian women novelists and short-story writers are first-rank anywhere on this planet….I hesitate to mention this back cover blurb of Crow Lake, but….”A Book of the Year, as chosen by the Globe 100, The New York Times and the Washington Post”….

This is a story of a woman kind of coming to terms with her past. Her parents died when she was very young and she and her sister were raised by her brothers. She is looking back on this, about 20 or so years later and struggling with the idea of introducing her boyfriend to her family.

This is a simple story. It is written simply and beautifully. I loved every word. It is a short little thing and I couldn't help but wish that it was longer.

Part of what I loved was the descriptions of farm life a More...

This is novel is also set mainly in a rural farming community, and concerns the Morrison family, and to a lesser degree that of their neighbours the Pye family. The Morrisons lives are changed for ever by the early tragic death of their parents, leaving the two eldest boys to make some tough decisions, and sacrifice their future's for their younger sisters. The story is narrated by Kate the third of the four orphaned kids. This is a novel about family, and our understanding of one another, it is More...

Crow Lake was the debut book of Mary Lawson with The Other Side of the Bridge following a few years later. I read The Other Side of the Bridge before Crow Lake and I am so glad I did. If I hadn't, I would have been sorely disappointed because Crow Lake would surely have set up high expectations. So, because I read it second I got to be pleasantly surprised instead!
It's not that I didn't like The Other Side of the Bridge but the story did very little for me and now I can't even remember the plot More...

Crow Lake, Mary Lawson
Unknowingly, I read the book twice. After I got a few pages in, I realized it, but my first reading was years ago and the book seemed so interesting that I continued on with it for the second time. I was not disappointed.
It is a tender tale which begins with the memories of a seven year child and progresses over the next twenty years. We watch as problems, arise and are resolved, often with unintended consequences. It is a tale about overcoming disaster, about not letting a More...

I loved everything about this book. It's set in places I've always wanted to be: on a farm, and at a university. Its narrator, though highly educated, is startlingly unseeing. But she loves, and she learns. What else do you need for a great story?

We hear all about the people, situations, and 'landscapes' that serve as the narrator's teachers.

Author Mary Lawson is by turns so thoughtful and very funny here. Characters are vividly drawn; the plot unfolds at just the right pace; and the simple an More...