Star Lake Saloon and Housekeeping Cottages by Sara Lindsay Rath

Product Details

Synopsis

In this first novel from award-winning writer Sara Rath, the forests and lakes of northern Wisconsin pose a daunting threat to outsider Hannah Swann, who is content with her quiet life in Madison, Wisconsin, where she teaches and writes screenplays about obscure nineteenth-century poets. Her relationship with her college-aged daughter is strained yet candid, and a long-standing affair with a married professor has its own peculiar ups and downs.
When Hannah unexpectedly inherits her uncle's rundown resort, she must head to the northwoods to close up and sell the business. But the only interested buyer is Ingold, an international mining company, and Hannah finds herself reluctantly operating the resort while trapped in the midst of a treacherous dispute between Ingold and Uncle Hal's activist friends.
From safeguarding the wilderness to pursuing elusive new love interests, Hannah has plenty to engage her imagination at Star Lake. A new aspect of her personality emerges, one that is surprisingly courageous and compassionate. Throughout this humorous, elegantly plotted adventure with its appealing characters and lyrical depictions of nature, Hannah encounters the inevitability of change—in herself and in the nostalgic landscape of the deep North.

Publishers Weekly

A Madison, Wis., woman takes a midlife detour to the northern woods of the Badger State after an uncle wills her a crumbling resort on remote Star Lake. Hannah Swann's personal and professional life may be a bit stagnant-she writes about "Bad Women Poets" of the 1800s and pursues a half-hearted affair with a married man-but she's still loathe to spend too long up north. But as she rolls up her sleeves and opens the resort, she begins to shake her self-doubts and her reliance on Valium, bonding with chirpy, folksy barmaid-cum-taxidermist Ginger. Ginger nudges Hannah into friendship with fishing guide Dan Kerry, who in turn enlists Hannah in the fight against a mining company that threatens Star Lake, thereby helping her find common ground with her activist adult daughter. Family secrets and industrial misdemeanors make for lightly troubling threads in Hannah's summer of reinvention, but Rath's excessively oddball cast of characters, from the lascivious smalltown lawyer to the bird-regulating "Loon Ranger," lighten the mood. Hannah's release from paralyzing self-doubt has its predictable setbacks and victories, but her gradual acceptance of Star Lake's eccentricities makes for a diversion as pleasant as a quiet summer day at the lakeshore. (Aug.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Biography

Sara Rath is the author of four volumes of poetry and five nonfiction books, including The Complete Cow. She has also written for television and film. She lives in Spring Green, Wisconsin.