Weathering by Lucy Wood

This novel - Weathering by Lucy Wood - surprised me.  I started it, put it down and picked it up again a couple of weeks later to find myself completely entranced by the three generations involved in this poignant story.

Ada is in the middle: daughter and mother, returning to a childhood home in order to spread the ashes of her recently deceased mother, Pearl.  Pepper is the youngest, only 6 and socially awkward but extremely observant and skilled at listing. Ada is forced to deal with a wood burning stove, a house in great disrepair and her own inner struggles with loneliness and guilt. 

The nearby river, too, seems like another character almost. Even though there is not a great deal of action in the story, I found myself reading quickly as the language is so descriptive and able to evoke powerful feelings. I wish I had read it during the very rainy spell we spent recently in Dublin.  Wood’s writing is itself beautiful and full of details:

• [Rain] wore away at her bones.  Battered, huddled on her rock, each drop seeping in until she was doused. The rain filled holes in the road; it filled flowerpots to the brim.  It filled the blocked gutters of the house and spilled over – dark, shiny water mixed with leaves and soil.
• Why did she do it [take nature photographs]? .… For the way that time seemed to slow down and stretch, measured in the river’s ripples rather than by clocks and mealtimes. For the invisibility. For the hush. To forget. To make some sort of record – but of what she wasn’t sure exactly. To notice things she wouldn’t otherwise have noticed: dragonflies hunting, the patterns of light, the specific way that water poured over a dipper’s back.

Weathering by Lucy Wood will pull you into a contemplative mood; it received a starred review from Kirkus.