From Booklist
Critically acclaimed but not well known, Robinson will reach a broader audience with this hold-your-breath novel of loss and love. Devoted to her work for Environmental Protection Resources, Isabel is trying hard to recover from the shock of her first husband's death. She likes Paul's thoughtfulness and convinces herself that a peaceful rather than passionate second marriage is appropriate. Loving wilderness, she embarks optimistically on a vacation in the Adirondacks with Paul's parents and brother, Whitney. But rather than contentedly contemplating nature, Isabel finds herself embroiled in tricky family conflicts. Alarmed by Paul's simmering fury and dangerously attracted to Whitney, she is assailed by painful memories of her harrowing first marriage, which Robinson skillfully sets in chilling counterpoint to the increasingly heated dynamics of Isabel's present predicament. As family strife turns incendiary, forest fires erupt on the drought-afflicted landscape, and Isabel fights for her life in an emotional and literal inferno. Writing with rapturous intensity of nature both wild and human, Robinson forges a love story of unusual complexity and satisfaction.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Product Description
In this brilliant, luminous novel, one of our finest realist writers gives us a story of surpassing depth and emotional power. Acclaimed for her lucid and compassionate exploration of the American family, Roxana Robinson sets her new work on familiar terrain—New York City and the Adirondacks—but with
Sweetwater she transcends the particulars of the domestic sphere with a broader, more encompassing vision. In this poignant account of a young widow and her second marriage, Robinson expands her scope to include the larger natural world as well as the smaller, more intimate one of the home.
Isabel Green’s marriage to Paul Simmons, after the death of her first husband, marks her reconnection to life—a venture she’s determined will succeed. But this proves to be harder than she’d anticipated, and the challenges of starting afresh seem more complicated in adulthood. Staying at the Simmons lodge for their annual summer visit, Isabel finds herself entering into a set of familial complexities. She struggles to understand her new husband, his elderly, difficult parents and his brother, whose relationship with Paul seems oddly fraught. Furthermore, her second marriage begins to cast into sharp relief the troubling echoes of her first. Isabel’s professional life plays a part as well: a passionate environmental advocate, she is aware of the tensions within the mountain landscape itself during a summer of spectacular beauty and ominous drought.
In her cool, elegant prose, Robinson gracefully delivers a plot that is complex, surprising and ultimately wrenching in its impact. As the strands of family are woven tightly and inevitably together, and as the past painfully informs the present, the vivid backdrop of the physical world provides its own eloquent dynamic.
Sweetwater is a stunning achievement by a writer at the peak of her craft.
From the Hardcover edition.
