The Long-Shining Waters
Across the centuries, three women find their fates bound to the shores of Lake Superior. In 1622, Grey Rabbit, a member of the Ojibwe tribe, fights for survival through a harsh northern winter, striving to protect her family but inadvertently placing her son in harm’s way. In 1902, Berit, the wife of a Norwegian fisherman, struggles to accept her barrenness and the toll it has taken on her marriage. In 2000, Nora, a grandmother estranged from her daughter and grandchild, finds herself suddenly unemployed and drifting, chasing after the human connections she has let slip away. Each woman must face a loss that tests her way of life – and must battle her own inescapable guilt.
Across these three interlocking narratives, Lake Superior itself emerges as the most vivid character – beautiful but harsh, bountiful but unforgiving. As Grey Rabbit, Berit, and Nora fight their disparate battles, it is always the Lake they return to, taking solace in enduring landscape and heritage. Danielle Sosin is a nature writer of the first order, highly sensitive to place, and her lyrical language creates an unforgettable backdrop for the novel. Of the three plot narratives, I admittedly found Nora’s contemporary story to be the most compelling; the themes of Grey Rabbit’s spiritual visions and Berit’s frontier isolation were a bit too familiar, and I did not find much resolution in either narrative. Nora, however, is a delight, and her contemporary journey around Lake Superior – with its attendant flurry of historical anecdotes, from the incursion of the French trappers to the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald – links Nora’s character firmly to her historical predecessors and provides a beautiful framework for this many-faceted story.
