Brixton Beach by Roma Tearne

Brixton Beach is a hard book to come by. It has very limited availability on Amazon--and only in the used market place. Luckily ILL was able to locate a copy for me to borrow; not so lucky with the other title I was looking for and was forced to break down and buy a used copy of off Amazon. Tearne is a British writer but is Sri Lanka born.

The book opens upon a scene of terrifying chaos. Simon, a London doctor is frantically searching for a loved one amid the chaotic aftermath of a bombing on the London tube. The scene is bewildering and heart pounding and vividly drawn.

In the next chapter we flash back to Sri Lanka; it is 1973 and Alice is nine. Her mother, Sita, is expecting a new baby. Sita is Singhalese; Stanley, Alice's father, is Tamil. In Sri Lanka the Tamils are a bitterly oppressed group and are seen as less civilized by the Singhalese, who are the ruling ethnic group. There's friction and tension slowly building to a violent conflict of civil war between the oppressed and discriminated against and the oppressive government and military. Stanley has plans eventually to move his young family to England where his younger brother has been living for years. He dreams of better opportunities for himself, and he wants to escape the growing violence and prejudice and oppression he suffers in his homeland.

This is the story of a family and its misfortunes as they are caught up in the tensions that threaten to tear their beloved country apart. It is also about the rising tensions and violence in a country that is rolling painfully and dangerously towards a bloody, violent civil war. The story of Sri Lanka is mirrored in the life of Fonseka family and the ensuing tragedies that threaten the fabric and cohesiveness of their family. The book tells the story of the years and decades leading up to the events portrayed in the opening chapter.

The writer vividly portrays the atmosphere and environment of Sri Lanka, which becomes another character in the story. The isolation felt by Alice, cut off with little communication with her family left behind in Sri Lanka, is convincingly and heartbreakingly drawn. The reader can't help but hope that there's a happy ending for Alice when so many close to her never found their happy endings.

I highly recommend this novel.

Crow Lake by Mary Lawson

When the end came, it seemed to do so completely out of the blue, and it wasn't until long afterward that I was able to see that there was a chain of events leading up to it. Some of those events had nothing to do with us, the Morrisons, but were solely the concern of the Pyes, who lived on a farm about a mile away and were our nearest neighbors." from page seven

I must confess that it took me longer than it really needed to in order to finish the novel Crow Lake by Mary Lawson. The entire story is building up to the big catastrophe that forever destroys all the hopes and dreams the Morrison clan ever dared to hope and dream for its future. In the eyes of the narrator, it is even worse than the tragedy of the car crash that claimed both parents' lives one evening on the heels of some good news the family has received and celebrated. Now you can see why I dreaded getting to the end of a book that drips in foreboding like nobody's business. What can be a worse tragedy for a family than when both parents die at the same time leaving two teens, a seven year old and a year old baby behind?

Kate Morrison is a zoologist living in southern Ontario. Thanks to childhood trauma stemming from her parents' deaths and the ensuing "catastrophe" that destroyed her family, she is emotionally estranged from her siblings and unable to truly connect and open up to her boyfriend. Granted this also stems from the way she was raised: her parents were of Presbyterian stock that weren't given to expressing emotion and discouraged overly emotional displays. This is vastly different from the way Kate's boyfriend was raised as an only child in a household in which emotion erupted and spilled all over the place.

Kate's about seven when her parents are killed in a car crash. Rather than split up the family, the oldest boy, Luke, forgoes a college education in order to raise his younger sisters, and hopefully give younger brother, Matt, who is considered the real brains in the family, a chance at a college education in a year when he graduates from high school.

This is the beautiful, insightful tale of how the Morrison children's lives were derailed by the deaths of their parents and the events that followed in the first year after the tragedy. Throughout the narrative Kate makes an effort to pinpoint the exact spot, the exact catalyst, that set everything else in motion leading to another catastrophe. It is clear that events cascaded, falling like dominoes until the last domino fell.

In the end Kate realizes that the true tragedy that came to wreck her family, specifically her relationship with her beloved brother and mentor, Matt, who taught her all there is to know about nature and pond life, is not that which she had first perceived it to be. Instead it was her misperception of it all that robbed her of her relationship with her brother and prevented him from re-establishing a connection with her years later after she has ended her estrangement from her siblings.

Ultimately this is a riveting, page turning narrative of a woman's recount and analysis of the events, incidents, and perceptions that lead to estrangement from her family and finally to the healing and re-interpretation of events that was required for her to come back to them and the brother who mentored her when she was a girl. Kate's a deeply logical, rational, analytical person, socially awkward and unable to understand and feel emotions, specifically empathy. But logic and rationality can never understand the complicated emotions and events that lead the dysfunction of a neighboring family to infect her own.

I highly recommend you read this book.

--Reviewed by Ms. Angie