August 5, 2008

The New Book:

3 comments:

  1. I actually started reading this before the trip over here, but I don't think I ever finished it. I might have to do that this weekend.
    mom

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  2. Mom, I love that you figured out how to comment! Love it!

    Here's the synopsis on the back of the book, Beckers (and I quote):
    A modern classic that 'brilliantly portrays the impermanence of all things, especially beauty and happiness' (Paul Gray, Time), Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone, which is set on a glacial lake, the same lake where their grandmother died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town 'chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occured elsewhere.' Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.

    I'm reading this book because I read Gilead by the same author. It was one of those book that lifted my heart and I'm always touched through her writing by her wit and humility (and astounding intellect!). She's a genius.

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