Vacationland

Aside from the taxidermy, this is the best Sarah Stonich book I've had every night on the couch pleasure to read.

So many things - from one of the most memorable opening chapters ever to the lake and forest and sky descriptions
to the many distinct and well defined characters to the gently always moving along story to the oddly awkward ending -
make this book one to keep and read again, with the wish that it could go on forever...and that my daughter and I
could vacation in Nalidi!

What I wish was different is the house built so high > it will be impossibly dangerous in the winter and anytime for a dog and a painter as they age.

I loved Vacationland by Sarah Stonich. Vacationland is a collection of 15 interrelated stories that all share a connection to Naledi Lodge on Little Hatchet Lake on the laurentian divide in Minnesota. It was a summer resort, dubbed "vacationland" years ago, but cabins have disappeared and it is now a private home. Naledi Lodge was built and ran by Czech immigrant Vaclav Machutova for many years during its prosperity. Meg , his granddaughter, spent summers there and winters in Chicago boarding schools after her parents are killed in an airplane crash. Now Meg is an artist who makes Naledi her home.

Stonich's writing is impeccable. Each story could stand alone but together they made a beautiful descriptive symphony. It was a serenade of show more emotive descriptions. I love all of Stonich's descriptions of the settings in Vacationland. They are simultaneously seductive, but spiritual; atmospheric yet pungent. I could feel everything - the bitter cold, and then the scorching heat and biting black flies. I could smell the woods, feel the weather, experience and appreciate the environment and terrain like a local.

I appreciated the portrayal of her characters just as much. They were all handled with such empathy and humanity as their struggles were slowly revealed. Each of them has a unique, individual voice. They are complex, fully realized characters. As a summer resort worker many years ago, I knew many of these people - the dismissive summer people, the reticent terse locals, the old men drinking coffee. I understand the difference between the people who just visit briefly and those who stay.

Contents
Separation: A scene with Meg, as an adult and prominent artist, after her dog brings home an unpleasant surprise.
Reparation: An man recalls an affair he had at Naledi with another guest.
Destination: Adult sisters recall an euthanasia promise they made to each other when young.
Assimilation: A Balkan refugee struggles to assimilate into the community.
Moderation: A counselor at a rehab clinic deals with his angry, aging father
Navigation: A young girl gets lost when visiting her great grandmother's cabin.
Calculation: A young couple wants to start a family.
Echolocation: An American Indian man finds his way after a life changing event in a changing community.
Omission: Aging, long time resident of Little Hatchet Lake, Ursa Olson, struggles to remain self-reliant.
Orientation: Meg's aunt and cousin delivers her mother's ashes.
Disembarkation: Meg's parents die in a plane crash.
Hesitation: A science professor and soon-to-be writer, Polly, stays at Naledi when Vaclav nears the end of his life.
Approximation: Polly's childhood and life before Naledi.
Occlusion: Meg and her elderly surrogate grandmother, Polly, at Nadeli.
Tintinnabulation: Meg reflects on her life as an artist to a student reporter

I loved this collection.

Very Highly Recommended

Disclosure: My Kindle advanced reading edition was courtesy of the University of Minnesota Press via Netgalley for review purposes. show less

There's something so appealing about an old resort closed down for the season, or closed down forever. As we wander among the cabins and faltering foundations, past the lodge and the camp store, peering into the windows as we go, we always imagine more good times than bad. You can almost hear the ghosts of family vacations -- cook-outs, fishing trips, summer romances, and children squealing joyfully as they run through the long summer nights, well past their bedtimes.

In this novel-in-stories, Sarah Stonich takes us to just such a derelict resort, where the ghosts of the past mingle with the locals who are still very much alive. Naledi Lodge sits in Northern Minnesota, so close to Ontario that there's a point where you can throw a rock show more into Canadian waters. Tourists and entrepreneurs may come and go, but the year-round residents of nearby Hatchet Inlet remain solid and taciturn, rolling with the changes while clinging to traditions.

The stories are presented in non-linear time. At the start it seems confusing, but eventually you begin to recognize the characters and connections in their various incarnations, back and forth through the years.

Meg Machutova and her Czech grandfather Vac are the central characters tying the stories together. Vac was the owner of Naledi Lodge in its prime years of operation. Meg is left with its crumbling remains, unable to let go of the only place that signifies "home" for her. The most poignant aspect of the novel is Meg's journey through life as an orphan, eventually tracing her roots further back than she ever expected to go.

I did enjoy these stories so much, for all the reasons I loved Sarah Stonich's other two novels. She writes with an artist's eye for beauty, and she diligently works to forge a connection with her characters in the heart of every reader. She's a native of Minnesota, and brings local flair to her stories, incorporating that unique blend of Finnish, Swedish, and Native American heritage.

What surprised and delighted me in these stories was the humor, especially in the first few pieces. I don't recall finding that playful naughtiness in her other works. I lost track of how many times I had to put the book down and cackle.

If you balk at the mention of short stories, I highly recommend starting with Stonich's other two novels, These Granite Islands and The Ice Chorus. After you fall in love with her writing, you may decide to stick your toes in the water at Hatchet Inlet. show less

Vacationland by Sarah Stonich published 2013 is a book set in northeastern Minnesota (my home area) and the book for my f2f bookclub in September. It is a series of linked short stories about "place" and the connections that place gives to the characters found in these stories. This was enjoyable read with a nice mixture of tension and humor with the flavor of style of Alice Munro, Tim O'Brien, Jennifer Egan, and Elizabeth Strout. Stories are set in the past and also in more recent times. A character found in the first chapter shows up in the last story. Though the story is set in a fictional resort called Naledi, this is somewhere near Ely and brings thoughts of the resort on Basswood that I could go to before the boundary waters were show more established. The town of Hachet Inlet which reminds me of Ely, a place I lived for 11 years and visited often before and after I lived there and where my family still lives. The author really expands on the characters that you would find in this area, making little changes but still captures the different ethnicity found in this area. The land of trees, Ely greenstone, insects, mines, casinos (actually in Tower, Lake Vermillion), the hospital and the auto accidents that were quite common on Hwy 169.

Quotes:
"there's a lot to be said for conserving words"
"then there's here, where time is cyclical, the seasons defining all, where nothing much besides the inevitable happens."
"If there is one constant threading through her life, its been water and she rarely strays very far from it."

Because I knew the area so well, sometimes I would react when it wasn't accurate but I was able to let that go but I also found some items where the research could have been better, especially with the chapter Approximation but it did bring to my memory the little place on 169 before you got to Ely where the owner would immaculately prune his pines into perfectly groomed shapes. show less

Delightful read. Linked stories with all sorts of characters who visit a northern Minnesota resort. Laughter and tears.

DNF 100 pages in.

This was so bad. I had such a hard time understanding what was going on, nothing mattered to me, and there were so many slurs. The idea of the book, a man and his grandfather running a hotel and the book is a series of short stories of all the people who stay there, is a good idea, but the execution was so bad. I understood the first short story well enough, but got increasingly confused as I went along, and found myself spending more time counting the pages I had left in each story than time spent actually reading. To make it worse, there was a slur on almost every other page. This book was only written 12, almost 13, years ago, which almost makes the usage of them even worse since it was written so recently.

This book was a secondary pick for my book group (I picked two because the first was a YA quick read). I chose it from the MN Book Award nominations list - short stories and north shore MN... sounds good! I loved this book. Well developed characters with clear voices work well as members of the short stories and even better in the collection that creates the world of Vacationland. Every time I have recommended it since my read, it has been loved. Thoroughly satisfying.