From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Urquhart's passion for the past (
The Stone Carvers) and the land (
The Underpainters, winner of the Governor General's Award in Canada) are at full poetic play in this intricate story of love, loss and memory. Set in present-day Toronto and in the 19th-century world of rural Ontario timber barons, it opens with the wintry death of Alzheimer's sufferer Andrew, whose body, borne by an ice floe, runs aground on the small Lake Ontario island where artist Jerome McNaughton is seeking inspiration. The story steps back a century, to when Andrew's ancestors, owners of the same island, razed forests to build ships, then it jumps forward a year from the opening scene of Andrew's death, to when Sylvia, Andrew's married lover of 20 years, sets out to meet with Jerome, who discovered Andrew's body, and, through Jerome, to reconnect one last time with Andrew. Meanwhile, Jerome, the relationship-shy adult child of an abusive, alcoholic father, is slowly coming to trust that girlfriend Mira's love for him is real. Urquhart reveals all of their haunted personal histories in the lyrical first and third parts of the novel. But it's in the compact family-saga middle, where a slew of Andrew's memorable forebears take the stage, that this novel's luminous heart truly lies.
(Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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A year after Andrew Woodman is discovered frozen in ice on remote Timber Island in Lake Ontario, 53-year-old Sylvia Bradley journeys to Toronto to meet artist Jerome McNaughton, who found the body. Sylvia, afflicted with an unnamed "condition" (including not wanting to be touched and having no physical relationship with her husband, a doctor who married her understanding this constraint), tells of being the longtime lover of Woodman, who opened her cloistered life before she lost him to Alzheimer's. More than half of the book tells of historical geographer Woodman's forbears, whose fortunes were tied to the land: great-great-grandfather Joseph Woodman, who built an empire on Timber Island, and particularly Joseph's son, Branwell, who married the orphan whom Marie sent to work at the family home, and Branwell's younger sister, Annabelle. As Sylvia opens Andrew's history and her own to Jerome and his companion, Mira, Jerome reveals his childhood with an alcoholic father, to the point of finding peace. In her typically concise yet lyrical language, Urquhart (
The Stone Carvers, 2002) explores the power of memory, history, and place in this story of love and grief at its loss.
Michele LeberCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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