★ 2019-03-18
Dead parents haunt Shreve's 16th novel (You Are the Love of My Life, 2012, etc.).
In 2007, George Washington University professor Georgianna Grove still grapples with the mysterious tragedy that orphaned her as a small child. In 1941, when Georgianna was 4, her father, William, a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, went to prison for murdering her mother on a canoe trip to the Wisconsin summer camp he ran. Four years later, William died in prison, leaving Georgianna to face a lonely childhood with unapproachable, anti-Semitic maternal grandparents. In reaction, Georgianna made the concept of "home" central to her research as an anthropologist and has continually welcomed strangers into the house where she raised her own three children. They'd become fatherless themselves at ages 4, 2, and still-in-the-womb when Georgianna's husband died in Vietnam. On her 70th birthday, Georgianna receives a letter from the only other person from the 1941 canoe trip who's still alive. At the time, Roosevelt McCrary was an 11-year-old child who had been hired, along with his mother, to work at the camp despite being black. As an adult, Roosevelt became a part owner of the camp and has retired there. Hoping he has information to exonerate William, Georgianna decides to revisit the camp and nearby murder site for the first time. She drags along her family—grown children Venus, Rosie, and Nicolas, whose work on Barack Obama's campaign hovers in the background; Rosie's 13-year-old son, Thomas, in the throes of grieving his own father's recent death; Nicolas' son, 15-year-old Jesse, and 4-year-old daughter, Oona, coincidentally Georgianna's age in 1941. Georgianna discovers that her parents' lives and deaths were more complex and mysterious than she thought and not truly knowable. Shreve creates a spooky atmosphere with stormy weather, eerie parallels between past and present, and at least one threateningly crazy woman. Even spookier is the backdrop of 20th-century racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-immigration feeling that are all too familiar today.
Part gothic novel, part adventure story, but primarily a meditation on surmounting misfortunes that may lie beyond an individual's control.
