Fai clic su di un'immagine per andare a Google Ricerca Libri.
Sto caricando le informazioni... Rainy Lakedi Mary F. Rockcastle
Nessuno Sto caricando le informazioni...
Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. nessuna recensione | aggiungi una recensione
Premi e riconoscimenti
InRainy Lake, author Mary Rockcastle invites the reader to savor the sights, sounds, and smells of summer at her parents' lopsided lakefront cabin during the 1960s. From the landscape of her memory, Danielle Fillian paints a sensitive and wise family portrait of summers filled with fly-fishing, swimming, water-skiing, new friendships, and a deepening first love. But with the intrusion of the Vietnam War and the rumblings of the civil rights movement growing steadily nearer, this sheltered vacation community is forced to acknowledge the harsh realities of the wider world. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
Discussioni correntiNessuno
Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Classificazione LCVotoMedia:
Sei tu?Diventa un autore di LibraryThing. |
Danny is a young teenager when her family decides to stop renting at Rainy Lake and to invest in a cottage of their own. Her mother falls for a slightly ramshackle home, trusting that her architect husband will be able to repair and renovate the place. And at first that is what happens. But the pressures of the times start to wear on everyone and the undercurrents threaten to swamp the family. Danny's father is unhappy at his firm and leaves to start his own business. Her adored older brother, extremely liberal in his thinking (he is furious when the local community club automatically votes to exclude a black family and he is adamantly against the Vietnam War), becomes as unbendingly rigid as those idealogues whom he opposes. Unable to hide his growing contempt for their father's compromises and increased drinking, he is growing angrier and more distant from the family. Their mother holds desperately to some new semblence of normal, trying to weather the brewing storm and make it through to calm waters.
Told in Danny's voice through several summers, the book skips through life at home, showing flashes of the discord that, at least in the beginning, dissipates once they hit Rainy Lake. But even the magic of the summer and the lake cannot hold off the rising tension that threatens to take them all under. Not only does the novel detail the disintegrating family but it also captures Danny's coming of age from the first time she lays eyes on Billy Dove, the half black, half white boy who challenges her brother's and friends' proclaimed color-blindness, to the day when she says goodbye to Rainy Lake as she prepares to leave for college.
There is a lot of humor in the telling of this book, despite the themes of racism, alcoholism, the rightness of the Vietnam War, and how liberalism can ultimately fail when embodied in people who only know privilege. Danny's desire to protect the nesting bats who have been in their cottage far longer than they have will ring true for anyone who has ever inhabited an old home. And her mother's raging fear of those same bats, driving her to sleep under the covers with her hair wound into a bath towel will make many summer home denizens chuckle.
Rockcastle has managed to evoke the halcyon days of summer on a lake while still showing the ways in which the lake is not as insulated from the outside world as a young teenager might perhaps think. And when the completely unthinkable happens and anger and tragedy and grief invade the idyll, Rockcastle has managed to be completely pitch perfect. This a coming of age in a time when so much roiled beneath the surface and so much more wasn't spoken about and yet through her wonderful and insightful narrator, we, the readers, are privy to not only the adult takes on each issue but the uncomplicated and innocent children's view as well. This is a wonderful read at any time but is particularly apt right now in the hazy, lazy days of summer. ( )