Crow Lake -- Mary Lawson

As a writer and scholar, a lover of words, there are few books I burn through reading without a single marginalia [Cue: chuckles if you're familiar of Billy Collins poem]. Oftentimes my lack of dog-earred paged and pencil stains is a good credit to the author for creating something so spellbinding that I am unable to move my hands from the page, my eyes hook onto the potential of the next word and my sleep cycle is ruined until I am able to finish digesting the book. Such is the case of Mary Lawson's Crow Lake.

Finding and deciding to purchase Crow Lake was a strange move for me. I tend to be stuck on my literary likes of genre and material. Unless a work outside of poetry, memoir, travel essay, or philosophy is handed or recommended to me, I won't find myself adventurous to pry it from the bookshelf, blaze some new territory, take a chance. However, I challenged myself with Crow Lake, wrestled with an internal monologue fighting against my usual character and purchasing from a genre from a "new" writer outside of my norm.

Before I could reason with my credit card, I was at home in a porch swing letting Mary Lawson's narrative fill me. I finished and re-read the final few pages again and again, rocking on a porch swing, unaware of the passage of time outside the lives of the characters Kate and Matt, Luke and Bo, swept in the relationships of siblings, of the distances of human interactions mirrored by life.

It isn't until the final pages that I left my enchanted state to add to marginalia notes. On the final page of the story, in scribbled script, dangling in the white space of open thought, I wrote, "lang + tone." A paragraph later I underlined, "silver birches," (p.291). Unless someone's taken a day to read the story, I don't think any number of letters on a page can significantly explain the meaning of that simple image.

I am hesitant to list my favorite books or pieces of writing. However, Crow Lake easily makes the cut. It is a story of tragedy -- and of healing -- and the miscommunications of guilt, shame, and unconditional love that bind people to one another. Lawson unravels the mysteries of a family and uses Canada's natural beauty as the enviornmental backdrop.

A review in the Washington Post got it right: "Lawson communicates not only the lovely awe and beauty of the landscape but the way its inhabitants function within it. Crow Lake 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."

And, o, my friends, I hope it is something in which you choose to lose yourself.