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From Amazon
2002 Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award Shortlist: Crow Lake, Mary Lawson's first novel, is an expansive story set in a backwoods northern Ontario farming community, but it makes forays into the research labs of the University of Toronto. The narrator, Kate Morrison, a young woman in her late 20s, looks back at the tragedies and struggles that lie at the heart of her childhood years. Kate's parents died in an automobile accident when she was seven years old, and the aftermath of that disaster is the concern of most of the book. Her older brothers--Luke, an earnestly self-sufficient everyman, and Matt, a humble youth but brilliant scholar--take charge of Kate and her infant sister Bo, working as farmhands and school janitors to make ends meet. Their fortunes are paired with those of the luckless Pye family, a self-destructive clan who live just up the road. Lawson delivers a strong family story in Crow Lake, but the novel does not fully realize many of its own ambitions. Kate grows up to become a biologist, but aside from a few textbook details of pond life, Lawson includes little that effectively depicts the landscape and natural texture of her setting. Kate constantly invokes local history as a matter of great importance, yet it is very difficult for the reader to determine just when the action takes place. Shorn of strongly developed senses of time and place, Crow Lake often founders in its narrator's own self-obsessed world. There is substance here, but Crow Lake feels too much like an overgrown, diluted Alice Munro story to be genuinely satisfying. --Jack Illingworth
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