Crow Lake
By Mary Lawson
Dial, $23.95
ISBN 038533611X

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Canadian writer spins a lyrical debut

"There's no end to how far back you can go, of course, when you're trying to figure out where something started," says Kate Morrison, a successful academic recounting her childhood in rural Ontario farm country. For the family at the center of Crow Lake, a new novel by Mary Lawson, the trouble started long before they were born.

Struggling to raise seven-year-old Kate and toddler Bo after their parents die in a violent car crash, teenage brothers Matt and Luke Morrison are feeling the tug between adult-sized responsibilities and the temptations of youth. Add to the mix the neighboring, crumbling Pye family and their difficult situation worsens. Both boys work the Pyes' farm to earn extra money so Matt, a gifted student, can attend university. But when the Pyes' plain, sweet teenage daughter Marie forms a desperate bond with Matt, the relationship that changes the course of his promising life.

So instead, it's Kate who eventually goes off to college, with all her brothers' unrealized aspirations tagging along. As a successful zoologist, Kate spends most of her time peeking into a microscope and as little time as possible pondering the fractured family she left behind.

Lawson's sentences are so lyrical they beg to be reread -- slowly -- for the sheer pleasure of it. Crow Lake is filled with the kind of honest yet assured storytelling usually reserved for much more experienced writers than Lawson, a first-time novelist whose work has sparked intense attention in both Canada and Europe.

Lawson is especially strong when taking astute jabs at the myth of the "normal" family. Hiding from his father's cruel abuse, Marie's brother Laurie crouches in the shadows of the Morrisons' yard and watches the four siblings eat dinner, ostensibly basking in blissful domesticity. If he'd been able to tap into any Morrison conversation over the last year, Laurie Pye would have known that what he saw in that kitchen was a rare quiet moment in a year otherwise wrought with tension, arguing and fear. As Kate said, "He'd just picked a bad night."

Crow Lake will ring true for anyone who has experienced the messy bonds of family, with all the disappointments, hurt and fierce love that entails. And who hasn't?

Amy Scribner writes from Washington, D.C.