Book review: Road Ends

Welcome back to my blog.  I thought I would throw in a book review for today of a book I read in January. 

Mary Lawson is my new favourite Canadian author. 

Lawson captures the feeling of winter and isolation in a small Northern Ontario town.  The story is set in the fictional town of Struan, that is located near the actual towns of New Liskeard, Cobalt and Haileybury,  north of North Bay.  Struan could be real as it resembles so many small towns found along northern highway corridors.  

The characters in Road Ends are believable, lovable despite or because of their flaws and read as realistic.  Lawson is able to draw compassion for her characters from her reader without that compassion overriding the reader's expectation that the characters needs to get their act together and take control. 

Road Ends provoked my thinking.  I paused after parts to contemplate what the character had revealed about themselves.  The book is written from the view point of three of the characters. It was actually important to note the dates at the beginnings of chapters as the book is not chronological between chapters but is chronological for each character telling of his or her story within the family. 

The ending was satisfying resolving the issues of the novel yet leaving the possibility of a sequel to close up the lose ends in the lives of some of the characters who have interacted with each other.  

I am looking forward to reading the first two books by this author; Crow Lake and The Other Side of the Bridge.  I will most likely read Road Ends again, once I read her earlier novels.  Some of the secondary characters in Road Ends are primary characters in the other novels.

I tagged some pages to read over and re read pieces that I felt were beautifully written or which evoke response from me.  It was though she was writing what I have sometimes felt about my own need to leave home and create my own path.

Reading Challenge: 

I decided to use this novel to fill the "book set in my home province" even though Struan is a fictional town.   Since Struan would be close to New Liskeard and near North Bay, which are both mentioned in the novel, it is very close to where I live.    A novel set in Northern Ontario is a better choice than a book set in Toronto to be representative of the province I live in.