Sanctuary Line

August 15, 2013
In Canadian Urquhart's latest (A Map of Glass, 2006, etc.), a grown woman returns to the abandoned family farm where she experienced her happiest and most emotionally troubling moments. A year after her cousin Mandy's death while serving in the military in Afghanistan, 40-ish Liz returns to the Ontario farm once owned by Mandy's father, Liz's maternal uncle Stanley, until he disappeared 20 years ago. The abandoned orchards Stanley once tended with the help of migrant farm labor from Mexico have gone to seed and decay. Now a scientist, Liz has come back to the area to study the annual migration of monarch butterflies between Mexico and this Canadian edge of Lake Erie. Liz talks some about her butterfly study, but mostly, her thoughts meander over her family's history, particularly her own childhood migration to the farm each summer from a lonely existence with her widowed mother, Stanley's sister, in Toronto. Stanley was charismatic yet vulnerable and slightly mysterious; his moods controlled the family. The Mexicans who worked the orchards every summer stayed mostly apart, but Stanley tried to get his two sons as well as Mandy and Liz to include one Mexican child, Theo, in their play so he could learn English. The boys were cruel to Theo, Mandy was oblivious, but Liz bonded with him. Not only were they both outsiders, but they both were being raised by single mothers--Theo's mother, Delores, supervised the other migrant workers. Although Liz knew little about Theo's winter life in Mexico, by adolescence, romantic sparks developed between the two. Then an ugly tragedy destroyed what had been a kind of Eden for everyone. As Liz reveals that tragedy and its aftermath in bits and pieces, she also ponders Mandy's more recent death and the secret affair Mandy was carrying on with a high-ranking officer. While Liz's own adulthood remains mostly a blank, Urquhart sensitively portrays her limited perceptions in childhood. Heavy with literary allusions and overt symbolism, Liz's ruminations make for a ponderously slow if finely tuned read.

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September 15, 2013

Like the monarchs she's come to study as they swarm the butterfly tree at her family's now-deserted farm in rural Ontario, Liz Crane is seeking sanctuary, painfully aware that "neither my much-loved cousin nor my enigmatic, haunted uncle is ever coming home." Cousin Mandy died in service to her country; Uncle Stanley, charismatic and controlling, has vanished without explanation after dominating the family for decades. The farmstead was first settled when some of Liz's "great-greats," as her ancestors are called, fled the American Colonies as loyalists; one branch of the family became lighthouse keepers, further reinforcing the themes of separation and solace seeking. Though Liz only summered at the farm, it clearly felt like her real home, and her recollections of this paradise lost--and how it came to be lost--are quietly moving. Liz's recollections include Teo, who worked the farm each summer with other itinerant Mexican laborers, hinting at a tragedy that connects to the other losses in her life in an unexpected, effectively startling way. VERDICT Another stately, thoughtful work from award-winning Canadian author Urquhart (A Map of Glass).--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2013
Like the migrating butterflies entomologist Liz Crane studies, she too has returned to her ancestral summer home on Canada's northern shore of Lake Erie, a trek she has joyfully made since childhood. Now, it is a land in decline, like Liz herself, suffering the ruination brought about by the unexplained disappearance of her charismatic uncle, Stanley, and the deaths of her beloved cousin Mandy, who was killed while on duty in Afghanistan, and Liz's first love, migrant worker Teo. As Liz moves into the decaying family farmhouse with its ghosts of generations of great-greats, she struggles to bring order to the chaos that left her family in disarray, relying on her knowledge of the migratory nature of butterflies to make sense of the more erratic behavior of human beings, with their secrets, lies, obsessions, and acts of betrayal. In precise yet passionate prose, acclaimed Canadian writer Urquhart (A Map of Glass, 2006) poignantly explores the ephemeral and transitory nature of love and family duty, offering a melancholy meditation on these gossamer but powerful ties.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)