Crow Lake

Item: Crow Lake
Author: WhichBook

Mary Lawson

A beautifully written and very moving story set in a small but close community around a lake. Four children, two teenage boys, a toddler and Kate, a girl of seven, lose their parents in a car crash. The book concentrates on the two years after this tragedy and shows the four coping as best they can. The story is told by the adult Kate, still trying to make sense of what happened. But this is not a bleak book; it contains some humour and a great deal of love and downright goodness. You will care so much for this family that you may well read it in one sitting

Extract

Matt was ten years older than I, tall and serious and clever. His great passion was the ponds, a mile or two away across the railway tracks. They were old gravel pits, abandoned years ago after the road was built, and filled by nature with all manner of marvellous wriggling creatures. When Matt first started taking me back to the ponds I was so small he had to carry me on his shoulders - through the woods with their luxuriant growth of poison ivy, along the tracks, past the dusty box-cars lined up to receive their loads of sugar beets, down the steep sandy path to the ponds themselves. There we would lie on our bellies while the sun beat down on our backs, gazing into the dark water, waiting to see what we would see.

Parallels