Sweetwater

author
Roxanne Robinson

plot synopsis in 50 words or fewer
After her first husband of twenty-five years dies, Isabel Green eventually remarries.  Sweetwater is set in the Adirondacks, at her new husband’s family summer home.  The novel seesaws back and forth between her current relationships and memories of her former one.

what really matters
The details.  This book is about the intricacies and dynamics of family.  While spending the summer in the Adirondacks with her new husband Paul’s, family Isabel is exposed to, and eventually caught up in the Simmons’s old family roles and dramas.  As time progresses, however, it becomes increasingly clear that elements from Isabel’s first marriage have begun to resurrect themselves with Paul, and that her own family dynamics cannot be ignored.

what i thought
This book came out of nowhere and boy and am I glad it did.  I picked it up at random and fell in love with it almost instantly.  A quiet, exquisitely written novel centering around a woman whose first husband of twenty-five years dies and the relationships she forms after him.  It is a novel whose beauty cannot be described with a plot summary and is reminiscing of Stegner's "Crossing to Safety" in both the way she uses a microcosm of human relationships to explore the universal themes of family, relationships and loss, as well as the stunning clarity of her prose.
Robinson is wise in her study of family, posing complex questions, which she attends to with a cool, almost detached grace.  It is out of these answers that Robinson constructs her characters—fraught with the divots and trenches dug out by life’s minor but steady offenses.

who else loved this book (or at least, say they did)
Billy Collins ("Sweetwater is a repository for all of Roxana Robinson's writerly gifts, most notably her keen eye for the details that make up the veneer of social and familial life and her awareness of the darker psychic rivers that run below that surface. She is a master at moving from the art of description to the work of excavating the truths about ourselves.")

Shirley Hazzard ("There is such quiet power in this fateful novel, present from the start and gathering to its culmination: a story of loss and remarriage, and of the harm done to, and by, vulnerable men and women. This is cool, intrepid writing, not a word wasted, creating a human tension that reflects our endangered world.")

other things this author has written
A Perfect Stranger and Other Stories
Summer Light
A Glimpse of Scarlet
Asking For Love
This is My Daughter