I just went ahead and started reading it again from the beginning. It's a beautifully wrought journey into a place that I really don't want to leave yet.
The book is, Vacationland by Sarah Stonich. It's written as a series of interconnected vignettes - each vignette introducing a different character or set of characters - all centered around a small resort on a lake in the far north of Minnesota, close to the Canadian border.
The chapters travel forward and back through time, from the founding of the resort by a taciturn Czech immigrant who escapes Prague in 1936 with his 2 year old son as the Nazis are on the move and his wife has run off with a German lover, through the life of his granddaughter, a painter, who after numerous twists and turns in her own life ends up making what's left of the old resort her permanent home some 20 or so years after her grandfather's death. In between we meet various resort guests from throughout the years, inhabitants of the small town nearest the resort, and the few remaining family members of the granddaughter, whose parents had died in a plane crash when she was 6 years old.
It's a gorgeous, sumptuous book, full of the sort of imagery that makes the reader just stop and breathe and savor. There's plenty of sly humor as well, and each character is drawn with compassionate detail.
I highly reccommend it.
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