The March selection for the LWD Book Club is an old favorite of mine, Housekeeping: A Novel. It’s been years since I read this book and I’m ready to revisit Fingerbone, Idaho. The eccentric lives of the main characters captured my attention many years ago.
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Housekeeping: A Novel
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
A modern classic, Marilynne Robinson’s 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 made into a film which can be rented on Amazon Prime:
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Link to all LWD Book Club selections…
I hope you enjoy revisiting the book, and find it as good a read now as you did when you read it before.