Mary Jane of the Lore Lands

Christin Lore Weber writes about herself as a child who bore a different name--Mary Jane Lore. The people, the places, the stories of the past are as she experienced them in the 1940s between her birth and her eighth year when she lived with her immigrant grandparents and their descendants on the Boundary Waters of Lake of the Woods in Minnesota. The remote beauty of the place, stories she was told of a family struggling to identify as Americans, influences of a grandmother with a steely will and unbreakable determination to succeed, of a mother whose tuberculosis had made childbearing forbidden but who bore her anyway, an early aviator for a father, and a grandfather who could soften an often frightening world with his stories and tenderness. This is a memoir through the eyes of that small child with mythic sensibilities, and interpreted by the woman in her wisdom years whom she finally became.