Description

A contemporary classic, Housekeeping may be the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who develop haphazardly, first underneath the care of the competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The household home is in the little Far West town of Fingerbone set on a glacial lake, exactly the same lake where their grandfather died in a magnificent train-wreck, and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It's a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the entire of history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the buying price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.