EDITORIAL REVIEWS for Two Faces of the Moon by Carolyn McGrath
Review by Jeffrey Sanzel - TBR NEWSMEDIA Long Island, NY Aug. 31, 2023
McGrath’s storytelling is boldly unsentimental. She was born to a mother of thirty-six and a father of forty-seven, a man who had a daughter from a marriage twenty years earlier. McGrath lost her father when she was seventeen but found herself constantly drawn to this “troubled man, an alcoholic, a heavy smoker, a war veteran, whose great talent for cussing often caused my mother to cover my ears. A father who clearly wished he had a son instead.”
The statement paves the way for years of rumination about their thorny relationship, explored throughout this slender, powerful autobiography. While many works of this nature err towards the hagiographic, McGrath is unflinching and frank in her account.
Each summer, McGrath leaves her Long Island suburban home to drive five hundred miles north to Bob’s Lake, Ontario. There, she spends several months living in the 1926-built log cabin her father bought in 1937 for $400. Life is rustic, with an outhouse and a four-burner kerosene stove. She must drive to the nearby farm to draw drinking water from a well. She is accompanied by her dog, Blue, and is joined by the neighbor’s dog, Ring.
While pondering the saying, “You could never go home again,” she answers: “The trick is to have two homes and never really leave either. I leave home to come home every summer and find it just the same.”
While the book delves into the history of the island, the cabin, and the lake, Two Faces of the Moon is, first and foremost, a tale of family. McGrath’s vivid, distinctly raw prose recalls the opening line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” She alternates between the 2001 narrative in present tense and musings on her parents’ lives. The intersection creates friction that leads to constant sparks of insight.
She celebrates her isolation. “The delicious feeling I have of being alone here is nothing like loneliness.” She examines the motivations for these journeys: “I discovered my craving for solitude when I realized that I was losing myself. There must be many wives like me who feel their lives were commandeered by the demands of marriage and family.” While directly referencing her parents, family, and friends, she never speaks of her husband by name.
For all the things she admired about her father, she was afraid of him and felt “as a role model, my dad was terrible.” The outdoorsman had focused on fishing, hunting, and frogging. “Guns were like wallpaper while I was growing up.” She'd aimed to please him but was also aware of the complexity of their bond.
In the present, she details visiting her elderly, ailing mother in the nursing home located an hour from the cabin. She paints one of the most vivid and heart-breaking portraits of aging, with a painfully accurate depiction of dementia. Her reaction to her mother’s passing and its aftermath is one of the most insightful moments in the book.
“While I’m here in the cabin, I feel I’m with both of my parents. My dad’s presence is everywhere […] my mother’s apron still hangs behind the kitchen door…” She shares her parents’ histories, scrutinizing their paths as a tool to reflect on her own choices. She accomplishes this without judgment but with a keen self-awareness. “It seems to me that children are born to be conflicted,” asking the questions: “Which parent do you love more? Fear more? Respect more?”
Living on the island is meditative, her own Walden Pond. And while she examines her life, she never loses the chance to be at one with her surroundings. “I wake up to the sound of Ervin’s cattle lowing lazily across the bay where they’ve come down to drink. Through the window, I watch seven young ducklings following their momma […] all moving as one large duck atom, no sound. Song sparrows have hatchlings in a tree cavity …”
Her world is a strange mix of stillness and teeming activity, allowing her to think, wonder, and, above all, feel. McGrath imparts wisdom and fallibility in equal measures. In short, she movingly presents a human being in all her dimensions. McGrath knows a long life comes with “pleasures and rewards, its booby traps and tortures.” She shares her experiences, trials, triumphs, and perspectives in the honest, sometimes lyrical, and always memorable Two Faces of the Moon.
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Review of Two Faces of the Moon by Shawn LaTorre, Story Circle Network - July 12, 2023
Carolyn McGrath’s memoir is as reflective and inspiring as the full moon she describes sending luminous ripples across water highlighting a path through the trees near her summer retreat. Her descriptions of the natural world on and surrounding a tiny island in Ontario, Canada will gather a reader and take them on a much needed vacation away from the lights, sounds, and concerns of city life....McGrath’s courage and love for this special place transform her over time, softening her life’s impressions. At the same time she wrestles with the obvious: the natural world surrounding her is being transformed by forces such as global warming, overpopulation, invading species such as zebra mussels, algae, and potentially round gobies from Eurasia that eat the eggs and young of other fish. It dawns on her that her family’s own actions may have upset the balance of life on the island as well. She writes: “The irony here is rich. In the 1940s and 50s, my family took what wildlife we wanted when we wanted it, but the Earth’s bounty isn’t infinitely expendable.” Reading Two Faces of the Moon provides one with a sense of wonder and peace at the beauty of place—Bobs Lake. I highly recommend this book for folks who enjoy reading about the natural world. It provides one with a sense of wonder and peace at the beauty of place. The author weaves real world concerns, family issues, personal doubts, and reckonings to make being on her island memorable.”
Review by Jeff Green – Frontenac News, Ontario June 28, 2023
One of the reasons that Two Faces of the Moon is such a compelling read, is that the author, Carolyn McGrath, is as interested in the lives of her neighbours on Bobs Lake, as she is in telling her own story and that of her family. Another is the scope of the story she tells. Although her memoir is set in the summer of 2001, which she spent in her cabin on an island on the lake, while her 96 year old mother was dying at the Sharbot Lake Seniors Home, it casts its gaze back to her childhood, the history of her family on the lake, and to their lives in the United States.
The point of departure in the memoir is the pending death of her mother This reality pushes her to remember, and re-evaluate events that took place at the cabin, on the island and among her neighbors on the lake, all the way back to early childhood.
The story of her father, who was a WWI vet who likely suffered from PTSD, and came alive in a certain way only at the lake, comes back to her as she looks at her own relationship with her father and mother in the context of the pending end of her mother's life.
Bobs Lake, the people and wildlife there, are all important characters in the book as well. The book contains rich detail about life at Bobs and Crow Lake, Bolingbroke and Sharbot Lake, throughout the decades right through to 2021. The names and events are not changed, and the details that give the memoir its richness all ring true.
A few things emerge from this. Not only does it reveal how Carolyn McGrath comes to terms with her family relationships through an account of events on the island, it also chronicles what life was like for generations of families who made their lives on and around the lake in the second half of the 20th Century.
Early in Two Faces of the Moon, McGrath talks about two other books about Bobs Lake, which were written by Laura-Lee Davidson, early in the 20th Century. One was called a “Winter of Content” about a winter that Davidson spent on the lake, and the other was called “Isles of Eden”.
The theme of the lake being threatened by development, which is touched on in Two Faces of the Moon, was taken up back in 1924 by Davidson, who wrote: “Alas, we fear . . . that, all too soon, our lake will become known to campers. . . . Then motorboats will go snorting about, spoiling the fishing and frightening the herons and loons away to wilder waters, and our silence will be broken by boat-loads of “sports” yelling and singing in the twilight and moonlight.”
Two Faces of the Moon delves into the role that Bobs Lake plays in Carolyn McGrath's life. In a way, it is her essential home, the only connection to her father, who came alive on the island in a way he never did anywhere else. The same is true for her, in a way, spending summers, often alone, on the island with her two dogs. The detail about her life on the lake, the light in the morning, the sounds at night, the reality of life with beavers and raccoons and foxes, the best way to cook frogs legs, are carefully described in the book, as are the visits to her mother, whose physical and mental strength are quickly ebbing away. All of these accounts ring true, and while her mother no longer recognizes her, Carolyn begins to see her mother anew as she faces up to the truth about her father, which is revealed as the memoir progresses. It is not as if she learns any hidden truths through the act of writing this memoir, she only writes what she already knows, but the act of writing the memoir reveals much to Carolyn McGrath about her parents, and about herself.
Because Two Faces of the Moon is so personal, so honest, and ultimately so well realized, readers of the book are drawn quite deeply into the cabin on the little island, and into the inner life of the author. The book ends with a post-script about what has happened since 2001. The world has changed. The events of Sept. 11, 2001 took place at the end of that summer, impacting her family. There have been changes in the ecosystem and culture of Bobs Lake, from accelerating development to the impact of zebra mussels and other invasive species. She says that the lake is more in need of protection now than at any point in the past, as she passes responsibility for the island on to her son James.
“Two Faces of the Moon – A Small Island Memoir” is essential summer reading. It is being published by Brandylane Publishers, and will have its official launch on July 24. It is available from Amazon and at Chapters/Indigo.
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Review by Lynn Watson - Greater Bobs and Crow Lake Association Newsletter Fall 2023
"We are all familiar with the work of Lloyd Jones who wrote The Dammed Lakes and Living by the Chase, telling the history of this place. In 1922, Laura Lee Davidson was inspired to write, A Winter of Content, a memoir about a winter she spent at her small cottage on an island on Bobs Lake. She also published, Isles of Eden, about vacationing on Bobs Lake in the summer. This summer, Carolyn McGrath has added her memoir, Two Faces of the Moon. Every page of this book is infused with a love of Bobs Lake and its people. In language that is poetic and lyrical, McGrath recalls one special summer out of the many she has spent on the lake. In 2001, alone on her island with two dogs, Blue and Ring, she tells a story filled with details of the nature and the people around her, fascinating to me. That summer she comes to terms with her past and her relationship with her mother who lies dying in a nursing home in Sharbot Lake. While she has always adored her father, who bequeathed the island to her when she was only seventeen, she is finally able to understand the source of the spirit who gave her the strength to return year after year alone to her island. She graciously shared a portion of the sales of her book at the Frolic with the Greater Bobs and Crow Lake Foundation."
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Review by Laurie Weir - Perth Courier - Inside Ottawa Valley July 5, 2023
“When McGrath was 17, her dad died and left her the island and its log cabin where she spends her summers alone. Her husband says people think she’s strange when she seeks solitude, but she defends herself in the book by telling stories of many women who have sought isolation in nature…. Anyway, can one really be alone with a black lab and a border collie?... Hold on tight. This book is full of dogs, frogs, and sobs, and a lot of delight….The book is getting rave reviews."
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Kirkus review – July 24, 2023
“This memoir nimbly captures the duality of nature within its pages….The book exposes deep, relatable truths about memory, mourning, and family.”
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Response from my son, James McGrath - 2023
Your book. Bravo. It's a beautiful piece of history. Wonderfully told. Only because I know the subject so well and have been living in it so much lately, I, unlike most readers, was drawn more intently to the stories of the grandfather I never got to know. Of course, the end is heartbreaking. Everybody dies. It wasn't that I wasn't aware of my grandmother's end, but to read it in detail was painful. Again, bravo for doing it, making it happen and creating a permanent document on what it is, this island that is much more than an island, making the wildlife leading characters and bringing to life the one human who truly made all of this possible for you, and for me.
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--Erin George, author of Origami Heart (a book of poetry) and A Woman Doing Life - Notes from a Prison for Women, Oxford University Press
"When I met Carolyn McGrath, I was an inmate worker in the prison library and she was a volunteer facilitating a book club. We both immediately recognized each other as fellow bibliophiles and would share long conversations about books and language and society and life in prison. She was, I think, deeply interested in how someone could exist behind bars, yet still live in the richest and most fulfilling sense of that word. A savvy observer of humanity, it is also likely that she realized that I was starved for just such a friend, one who shared so many of the interests that made me a puzzle to most of the people who now inhabited my world.
That friendship has endured through years, and I was fortunate enough to read an early draft of what would end up being Two Faces of the Moon: A Small Island Memoir, mailed to me a few pages per envelope (due to extreme prison mail room rules). The book I read today is different from that early draft, honed into a profound meditation on the difference between loneliness and being alone. Alone though I was as I read it, I was not lonely: I strolled beside my friend on her small island, scrambling over roots alongside Ring and Blue, and helping her build her own stone wall as I sat in a prison cell behind the State of Virginia’s walls. As to owning an island, she writes, 'Possession is more than a name on a deed. It means carrying the place with you when you leave....'
In Two Faces of the Moon, Carolyn carries her memories and impressions to the reader, bequeathing to them their own small claim on the island that helped define her. No gift could be more welcome."
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[Comment: When I first met Erin in the library at FCCW fifteen years ago, she told me that since she had to spend her life in prison, she’d dedicate herself to making it as good a place as she could. I began to quote Hamlet’s line, “I could be bounded in a nut shell” and she finished it: “and count myself king of infinite space.” While handicapped with lupus, she has been tireless in helping other inmates, encouraging literacy and crafts, learning Spanish in order to teach English to Hispanic inmates, creating a newsletter to give a voice and sense of community to the women there. I believe she is the only inmate there ever allowed to teach in a classroom without prison staff present. CM]
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