As a child, Kate Morrison lived in Northern Ontario with her parents, her older brothers, 19-year-old Luke and 17-year-old Matt, and her baby sister, Bo. When Kate was seven, tragedy changed all of their lives forever.

There's no end to how far back you can go, of course, when you're trying to figure out where something started. The search can take you back to Adam and beyond. But for our family there was an event that summer catastrophic enough to be the start of practically anything. It took place on a hot, still Saturday in July when I was seven years old, and brought normal family life to an end; even now, almost twenty years later, I find it hard to get any sort of perspective on it.

...from pages 7-8

I didn't know anything about this book when I started reading it, other than everyone said it was very good. They were right. It's a beautifully written, fairly quiet book with believable characters and a tragic story.

I liked young Kate much more than adult Kate. The older version frustrated me by her refusal to see her brother as a normal, and therefore flawed, human being. I liked all versions of Matt, I admired Luke, and Bo provided some much needed, although minimal, humour to the family. The character development in general, even of young Bo, was extremely well done.

The sense of place was excellent (Northern Ontario) but I didn't have a very good sense of the time period. I'm still not sure exactly when it was set but maybe in the larger scope of the book it wasn't all that important.

Lawson is very good at teasers, dropping just enough hints of upcoming events that it was nearly impossible to put the book down. I rarely read an author's works back to back, preferring to take a break between, but I liked this one so much that I immediately read her second book, The Other Side of the Bridge. I'm looking forward to reading whatever she comes up with next.

Reviewed by Lynn Bornath, February 2008.

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