Star Lake Saloon and Housekeeping Cottages

By Sara Lindsay Rath

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0299215245
• ISBN13: 9780299215248
• Release Date: April 2006
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Length: 334 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Delightful!

This book was a breathe of fresh air! I heard about it on WI Public Radio. Sara is such a wonderful writer. You find yourself immersed in the book, the charactors come alive and you wonder if they really exist somewhere at there. By the end of the book, you want to visit the Star Lake Saloon! This is a wonderful book and I hope you take the time to read it.

Captures Wisconsin

As a native of Wisconsin who loves the north woods and Madison alike, I enjoyed this book. I think it is always enjoyable to read a fictional story set in a place you are familiar with. Sara Rath did a good job capturing life in Wisconsin, complete with the ever-present mining controversies we have. I also enjoyed the language her northwoods characters use-not too far off the mark! The story itself transports Hannah Swan, a filmmaker from Madison, into Antler, WI when her long-lost uncle dies and leaves her a Housekeeping Resort. Hannah begins a journey with her inheritence from denial to acceptance of the property, the community, and the people she gets to know. The story isn't deep, but it is heartwarming. I would say that some of the sex scenes are gratuitous and unnecessary, but other than that, I enjoyed this novel.

Great Story

A friend shared this book with me over the holidays and I finally had an opportunity last night to sit down and read it. It was so delightful I continued to read until almost finished. Really enjoy Sara's writing style and the characters she brings to life at Star Lake. I really got pulled into seeing Hannah evolve from her first day when she discovered the resort and small little town, and to how that unwittingly changed her entire life. Great book, hope to see more novels from Sara.

Universal appeal in the north woods of Wisconsin

It was Coleridge who declared the hallmark of great literature to be the merger of the particular with the general, of the specific with the universal. While he was referring to English poetry, Sara Rath's novel "Star Lake Saloon and Housekeeping Cottages" meets that criteria effectively in the field of American prose fiction. Rath vividly captures the natural beauty of the Wisconsin north woods, a unique retreat in a geographically specific area, and skillfully populates her book with characters who come alive with emotions and dilemmas that readers can identify with, wherever they may live. It's been a long time since I've become as immersed in a place and the people who inhabit it as I have in the reading of this novel. It has a strong narrative pull that kept me wondering what its protagonist Hannah Swann would do as she faces life-changing decisions - whether to leave the academic world she's become accustomed to as a literature professor with a long-time married lover for a rugged life as proprietor of a run-down summer resort left to her by her uncle. Her new friends are quirky individualists who want to preserve the resort from a takeover by a mining corporation, and her environmentalist daughter is on their side. But old habits die hard - and Hannah's final decision is a cliff-hanger in the best sense of the word. And there are plenty of laughs along the way as the city girl learns about the pitfalls of living in the wilds of northern Wisconsin.

A Sojourn "Up North"

Star Lake Saloon and Housekeeping Cottages is a wonderfully compelling read. The characters' voices will echo in your mind long after the book is closed. They are robust people, beset by human foibles and frailties, ennobled by perseverance and passion. The setting is nostalgic, with its "rustic" cabins, replete with wobbly toilets, mismatched dinette sets, omnipresent taxidermy and sublime woods and water. Rath draws the conflict between mining interests that threaten Star Lake and Northwoods preservationists in all of its realistic and painful complexity. The novel is happily devoid of simplistic resolutions, reductive arguments and good guy/bad guy binary oppositions. Sara Rath's wit is a delight, prompting explosive guffaws and sly, ironic grins. I highly recommend this novel. By the last page, you will feel as if you've just returned from a blissful sojourn "Up North."