Farm Under a Lake - Softcover

Bergland, Martha

3.76

84 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679730117 ISBN 13: 9780679730118

Publisher: Vintage, 1990

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When Janet Hawn, currently living in Wisconsin with her husband Jack, returns to the Illinois of her childhood as escort to an elderly woman, she finds herself exploring both her past and her present

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Review:

Janet Hawn is driving back to rural Illinois, to the town and farms where she and her husband Jack grew up, to the place they've always wanted to return. But life has taken paths neither Jack nor Janet envisioned, and now twenty years have passed. Janet has a job driving eighty-year-old May, a woman who no longer speaks, to May's daughter's house. While on this drive Janet talks to May about her connection to Jack, to the land, putting yearnings into words for the first time, maybe because it's easier and safer with a listener who doesn't respond. Janet realizes "that I was making this trip to Illinois to learn what to say or what to do about who I was...I was trying to sort - with my skin and my eyes and my breathing and my remembering - what to keep, how far to draw a line of...what? Sisterhood? Eminent domain? Marriage? Duty? I don't yet know the terms for inside and outside." At the same time, watching and helping May, she can't help but wonder what her life will be like when she herself is eighty. Janet's journey is inward and poetic: she consciously senses and tries to understand how life can overtake you while you are living it, how you can suddenly find yourself somewhere you never thought you would be, and how this realization can put you on a new path. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Holly Smith

From Publishers Weekly:

Visiting the Illinois area where she spent her childhood, a woman contemplates her former, young self and her faltering love for her husband. "Luminous, limpid prose, unmarred by false notes or easy cliches," lauded PW. "This fine first novel is marked in all aspects by deftness, honesty and compassion."
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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