Danielle Sosin used to live down the hall from me, so I always meant to read this book. In 2013, it was chosen as the "One Book South Dakota" and I STILL didn't get on the bandwagon, but I finally got around to it two years late.

The book follows three stories taking place in three different time periods on Lake Superior: a Native American story in the 1600s, a pioneer story in the 1800s, and a modern (year 2000) story. Sosin pays a great deal of attention to the quiet moments in life and the writing is often beautiful. The book strikes a good balance between the three stories so that it is never too jarring to move from one to the next. I "enjoyed" the modern story most because it required the least work -- I had lived in the area around that time, and my best friend and I did a "circle tour" around the Great Lakes very similar to the one Nora takes. But I think the pioneer story was the one that will most stick with me, as it was incredibly haunting and I just kept hoping it would end differently than it did.

My biggest gripe about this book was its ending -- or lack thereof. I'm used to literary fiction being fairly open-ended and I'm more comfortable with ambiguous endings than most people are (probably because I'm guilty of writing them.) But I just felt that these three stories were TOO unresolved, especially the Native American storyline. I also wondered whether someone who did not have a personal connection with Lake Superior would find this book as evocative as a "local" -- although the descriptions are so vivid that a reader could probably finish feeling as she had lived there, too.

Man, I miss Duluth.

I am reading My Cat Saved My Life, which means my nose is a little plugged up.

Last night when I arrived at the chapter where Alice dies, I put the book down. I did not feel ready to face it. Yet it had already been awakened, the grief I still carry for Phoebe, and I knew I wouldn't be able to just switch gears. So I picked the book back up and let myself cry through the chapter. It's been over a year and I guess I still have some grief to work through. I thought at this point I could consider Phoebe's remembrance journal abandoned, but now I feel the need to finish her story after all.

Sometimes I feel guilty that Phoebe's death is my truest touchstone for grief, that I somehow feel her departure from this world more keenly than that of my Aunt Marian or my grandmother, such lovely souls, both. Reading My Cat Saved My Life is somehow reassuring, as the author has lost both is parents--their deaths pushed him into a depression that his cat pulled him out of--and when she died, he felt her loss so keenly that he had to pay her tribute in a book. Here is a man who has lost his parents yet still does not see the loss of his cat as a small grief, so perhaps there is nothing wrong with me for feeling Phoebe's death so keenly.

I think there are a couple issues at play here--one is that it is possible to wrap our heads around the entire life of an animal, so that when we mourn, we mourn every moment of her existence. A long human life is harder to comprehend--we can only understand those moments where it intersected with our own lives. I have a jumble of disjointed memories of my aunt and my grandma, but I did not live out the entirety of their lives beside them as I did with Phoebe. Because of that, it is easy to "forget" that they are gone from this world. It just feels like I haven't seen them in a while.

But when Phoebe died, she left a hole in the day-to-day fabric of my life--if I forgot she was gone, such forgetting only lasted a moment. Her sister's presence in bed with me each night served as a reminder that her weight against my legs was missing, as did the ritual of filling just one bowl at feeding time rather than two.

Also, I was responsible for Phoebe's time in this world in a way I wasn't with the humans I have lost. I made sure she was fed, watered, vaccinated and cared for when I was away. I was her advocate and her voice in the world. And I was even the one who made the decision to let her leave it. I met her mere weeks after her birth, and I stood beside her with my hand on her body at the moment of her death.

I feel this is a blasphemous comparison, but perhaps the deaths of animals hit us so hard because they fill a role like children* in our lives--they remain dependent, we must nurture and care for them, they love us without question or complications ... and then they are gone, and all that love and nurturing that went into giving them a good life floats free, with no idea where it should land.

 

Back home with my favorite furballs! #100happydays #cats #catpictures

A photo posted by Lacey Louwagie VenOsdel (@laceyvenosdel) on Apr 28, 2014 at 9:47pm PDT

* I do not mean to suggest that the death of an animal comes in any way close to the devastation of losing a child. I only mean that I think animals speak to the same parts of us that children do, and that they awaken many of the same protective and nurturing instincts.

My husband and I have been swamped with a big work project this weekend, so with both our laptops and our four feet (at various intervals) attempting to share our small coffee table, along with an occasional attempt by the cat to also share said table, I figured I should announce my new book arrivals and tuck them safely away. The coffee table where I usually hold new books for "processing" has become a dangerous place indeed!

Dark Eden by Chris Beckett - This is one of those books I put on my wishlist and now do not remember why or where I learned of it. I have to trust myself of the past for having a good reason! It's a dystopia.

Plover Landing by Marie Zhuikov - My friend Marie's second book, sequel to Eye of the Wolf.

My Cat Saved My Life by Phillip Schreibman - Referenced in Soul Comfort for Cat Lovers, this is the book my heart really wants to read right now, and makes me feel that I won't have to make Soul Comfort last quite as long.

Making a Literary Life by Carolyn See - I found out about this book through an interview with Lisa See in Writer's Digest.

If you're looking for a book to take you away this summer, consider giving this one a try.

"Eye of the Wolf," while technically a paranormal romance (there is romance, and there are werewolves), it's far from what we've come to expect from the genre. There are a lot of things that make this book different -- the vivid, lush descriptions of the Isle Royale in the 1980s; the believable and nuanced cast of characters; the somewhat claustrophobic feel of being isolated on the island for a summer. But what really makes this story different in the wolves.

Marie Zhuikov's story puts the "wolf" back in "werewolf." Banish any images of half-lupine madmen howling at the moon, and replace them with people just like you and me who, through ancient magic, become psychically joined to the alpha pair of an Isle Royale pack desperate to save themselves at a time when the wolf population is suffering from years of inbreeding on the island. They know their only hope of survival is to reach the mainland, but to do that, they need human help. And to secure that help, they must be able to communicate with the humans. This is where the magic happens.

It's in the scenes with the wolf pack that this book really shines. Zhuikov's book is meticulously researched, and she brings us intimately into the world of the wolves, full of moose hunts, dominance struggles, pungent odors, and family loyalty. If you've ever wondered what it might be like to see the world through the eyes of these majestic and mysterious creatures, this book might get you closer than you'll ever be short of a werewolf bite.

The romance is atypical as well, with a beautiful and bittersweet ending that haunts me in the best way. Luckily, the sequel is out this summer, so you can read the last page knowing the story is not truly over yet.

I found this book in my mailbox via Paperbackswap when I returned from an out-of-town Easter trip. I used to live down the hall from the author, although I didn't know her particularly well. Still, I've been meaning to read her book for years, and now I finally can! (Although I suspect it will make me homesick for Duluth.)