Under the Ice-Blue Sky of Crow Lake, Seeing Life's Origin

I’ve always felt that only after reading a book by an author who grew up somewhere can I truly hold that place in my heart.

The author of Crow Lake was born in rural Ontario, Canada. Her protagonist, zoologist Kate Morrison, is the only one in her family who left the countryside through education. On what seemed like a smooth path to the future, she tried to bury her bitter past, unwilling to speak of anything about her hometown, Crow Lake.

But a letter from Crow Lake forced her to journey north, back under that ice-blue sky, to face the origin of her life: her home, her three siblings, and the choices they made amid death, a chain of tragedies, and chaos. And the truth behind those choices—she didn’t understand it as well as she thought.

Some dialogues and reflections in the book are particularly touching:

“The tragedy is that you took it so seriously. So seriously that you let it destroy the relationship between you two, what you once had…”

“The problem is, you wouldn’t accept it. And the result is that he lost the shared memories with you. That’s the real tragedy.”

“I suppose the real question isn’t why I didn’t understand until that moment, why I didn’t figure it out years ago. Great-grandmother Morrison, I acknowledge that most of the fault lies with me, but I still feel you bear some responsibility. It was you, along with your love of learning, who set a standard by which I’ve judged everyone around me, everyone in my life, all these years. I single-mindedly pursued your dream. I read books and theories you couldn’t even have imagined. But somehow, in acquiring all this knowledge, I deliberately made myself learn nothing at all.”

I found this book on a library shelf and have been reading it these past few days. It feels quite good. If you have a day or two, or even just an hour or two of leisure time, give it a read. It might deepen your understanding of relationships between family members, but mainly, enjoy the feeling of being immersed in another world within the pages.