Children - Fiction & Literature, Fiction Subjects

Sister Water

Name: Sister Water
Author: Nancy Willard
ISBN: 9780804108768

by Nancy Willard

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Overview

The widowed Jessie Woolman, now in her seventies, her two married daughters, Ellen and Martha, and two grandchildren live in Ann Arbor, where the family owns a museum that harbors a meandering stream and historical artifacts of the region bounded by the rivers. Just as Jessie’s aging mind begins to wander, Ellen’s husband dies in a car accident and the Woolman family begins a new journey led by two very different men: Harvey Mack, a developer with an eye on the Woolman property and the grieving Ellen, and Sam Theopolis, a mystic hired to care for Jessie. Sam becomes both Harvey’s rival and a healing presence for the family until a crisis descends and he, too, needs the protection of the Woolmans’ innocent belief in the saving power of love. Combining sorrow and grief with considerable light-hearted wit and eccentric characters, Sister Water is a novel that will reach old and young readers alike. Through her lyrical prose, author Nancy Willard draws on the rich style of magical realism to create a narrative flow that is at once powerful and seductive. Important to the Landscapes of Childhood series, this novel raises significant questions about the state of childhood and how that state affects adult sensibilities.

From the author of Things Invisible to See comes a wonderful novel of love and loss set in the beautiful state of Michigan. Jessie Woolman has known the love of a good man and the friendship of her two grown daughters. Yet change comes as it always does, just when she leasts expects it. . . .

About the Author, Nancy Willard

Nancy Willard is a lecturer in English at Vassar College. She is the author of two novels, Things Invisible to See (Knopf, 1994) and Sister Water, and eleven books of poetry—the most recent of which is Swimming Lessons (Knopf, 1996). In addition to being a poet, essayist, and novelist, she is a noted writer of children’s books, including A Visit to William Blake’s Inn (Harcourt Children’s Books, 1981), which was nominated for the National Book Award and was the first poetry book to win the Newbery Medal.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Essayist Angel in the Parlor , children's author A Visit to William Blake's Inn and novelist Things Invisible to See Willard's gift for seamlessly mixing the magical and the mundane puts her in the company of Anne Tyler and Alice Hoffman. But perhaps it is her poet's eye Water Walker that infuses her work with intense lyricism and the power to wring the reader's heart with a phrase or an image. Here she fashions a moving story about a family in crisis and the power of love to transcend reality and ``open a doorway into the spirit world.'' At age 15, Jessie Nelson had a vision of the angel of death during a tornado in Drowning Bear, Wis. The widowed Jessie, now in her 70s, and her two married daughters and two grandchildren live in Ann Arbor, where the family owns a museum that harbors a meandering stream and historical artifacts of the region bounded by rivers. Jessie's growing senility forces her daughters one of whom loses her husband as the narrative begins to hire mystic Sam Theopolis as their mother's live-in caretaker. Sam's benign, healing presence is balanced by the brooding attentions of unscrupulous developer Harvey Mack, who wants to buy the museum and erect a shopping mall on land where the river tribe of Pawquacha Indians ``water is their occupation'' lived and died. In Willard's gently whimsical plot, two modern-day Pawquachas and their animal counterparts, a toad and a turtle play parts in rescuing Sam from peril and allowing love to flourish. Willard's intimacy with magic as well as her acutely observant eye for domestic routine blend to create an enchanting story. May

Library Journal

What is it that inspires authors to write delightful novels about the heartland? To W.P. Kinsella's musings about Johnson County, Iowa The Iowa Baseball Confederacy , Houghton, 1986, and Robert Waller's romp in The Bridges of Madison County LJ 3/1/92, we can add Willard's parable of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ann Arbor becomes a place of magic; here, for instance, a vagrant living on the streets by day becomes a toad at night. In the hands of a mediocre writer this would be silly, but Willard shares Kinsella's mastery of imagery. Her description of the lights being turned off in a room is one example: ``With each click a shovelful of darkness dropped over them.'' Behind all this wonderment lie the final days of Jessie Woolman as she watches her daughters Martha and Ellen come to grips with their selfhood after Ellen's husband dies in a car accident. The market for the Midwest novel may be crowded at the moment, but this work by the author of Things Invisible To See LJ 12/84 and Water Walker LJ 6/1/89 is a highly recommended purchase.-- Randall L. Schroeder, Augustana Coll. Lib., Rock Island, Ill.