Book Discussion: Housekeeping

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson Winner of the Pen/Hemingway Award -  A modern classic, "Housekeeping" is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother. The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake in the Far West, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transcience.

This book was chosen by The Center for American Literary Studies as the 2009 Community Read. The author will be at the State Theatre on Friday, April 17 from 7 - 9 PM. Other events include book groups at Webster's, Barnes & Noble and Kern Building. For additional information, follow the link at the left.