Beautifully written. In 2008, Lulu, a sixtyish actress, is performing in a Beckett play in an Ottawa theatre. She has been forgetting her lines and is concerned about her career. She leaves Ottawa for a small village in Lanark County, less than an hour away. This is the idyllic setting for the remainder of the novel. Lulu stays with a close friend, Nan, whose son is to be married that weekend. Surrounded by family and friends, she begins to evaluate her life. After losing her job in the play, she decides to return to Snow Road Station, where she finds happiness. Hay’s characters and language are lovely.

Snow Road Station. I enjoyed this book though I have questions. Mainly, is "early 60s" old? Beloved Canadian author Hay gives some hints that it is, and a few good ones that it isn't.🔥 Lulu, our heroine, a seasoned actor, runs away from an excruciating failure on the stage, repeatedly fluffing her lines in a play. Going back to friend and family in rural Ontario, over three seasons she stops having things happen to her, and starts to make things happen, evolving into an easier/simpler life in the country, with the joy of a new baby, her new great-niece, crowning her transition. 
Who am I if I'm not the old ambitious, striving, working me? What do I like now? Hay's prose is beautiful. The sequences about maple syrup production were lovely. The characters and the story were Canadian in a way that I appreciated.  If books contain maple syrup and homemade wedding cakes, so much the better. I'm getting closer to my intention to read more 🇨🇦.

There are some confusing relationships among the adults in this book. Everyone has a past. Adult kids struggle. It took me till at least halfway to be able to remember who was who, though part of that is the result of e-reading on netgalley's stripped down app. (No search function). I'm still a physical book reader whenever I can. Recommended, especially for people pondering their third act.

I loved the cover design from a painting by @shannonpawliw
Thank you author, publisher @penguinrandomca and @netgalley for this advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

I absolutely adored Elizabeth Hay's novel Late Nights on Air, which I think deserves a reread and a review. Her newest, Snow Road Station, has a lot of things in common with that one. Atmospheric, sweeping writing that elevates setting and somewhat lost characters reestablishing their ambitions later in life. Here, the setting is Snow Road Station, a rural Ontario town and a family of maple syrup farmers all hiding lifelong secrets and desires.

Our main character is aging actress Lulu Blake who has an abysmal showing on her newest play, forgetting her lines, and disappears to her hometown for a life reevaluation, a wedding weekend and a break off-the-grid. There's old loves that make reappearances, new intriguing men on the scene and her oldest friend, Nan, who has been in and out of her life over the years. Amidst the sap running, these relationships and their secrets come to a head and begin to overflow.

This is a slow, quiet book. Not a lot happens but there is a sense of characters finding themselves and coming home to roost. I liked the characters, and the sense of love lives and desire just deepening with time. I wish there had been more plot-wise, I never felt like I completely understood who these people were... but I was happy to spend some time with them. And the maple syrup was absolutely delicious.

I absolutely recommend for a quiet still read that's a bit sticky under the surface.

As someone living in rural Ontario, I was excited to read a book set in the province I love. Snow Road Station gave me the atmosphere I craved with perfect pace, and celebrated our four seasons with an alluring narrative voice. I loved seeing a woman of late middle-age as the main character, a demographic given, I find, little attention in literature. Lulu's energy and internal struggle drew me in and I was quickly rooting for her. While I appreciate the book's resolution, I did feel it dwindled in intensity in the last quarter. Overall an enjoyable, immersive read.

I thoroughly enjoyed this latest novel from Elizabeth Hay.

Lulu Blake, 62, has been an actor her entire life. Then in 2008, while starring in a Beckett play in Ottawa, she forgets her lines. Ashamed and panicked, she flees to Snow Road Station, a tiny village in eastern Ontario, where she stays with her best friend Nan. A family wedding and maple sugaring keep her occupied as she contemplates what she really wants to do with her life.

I was immediately drawn to the novel when I saw its title. Living in eastern Ontario, I know of the village. Also, having grown up in the 1960s and 70s only 20 kilometres away from Killaloe, I smiled at the description of some of its homesteaders: “draft dodgers . . . hippies from California who had made a new life for themselves in Canada.” I’m yearning for a BeaverTail!

After a crisis (snow), Snow Road Station gives Lulu a place to stop and rest (station) but also helps her move on (road). The author best explains the importance of the title: “The name is evocative, even poetic, with its three-part movement from snow to road to station—an arrival, a departure, a long wait—a place of rest, a stoppage, yet a road. That movement is mirrored in the novel, for not only did the name give me the book’s title, it gave me its three-part structure” (https://elizabethhay.com/snow-road-station/).

Acting has been central to Lulu’s life, “her religion, filling the emptiness in her.” Now, after forgetting her lines, she feels humiliated and unsure about how to proceed. Should she continue her career or surrender her long-held dreams? She asks herself, “What would it take? . . . Becoming who you’re meant to be, instead of turning into a major disappointment.” She has to learn who she really is, to follow the advice of Nan’s son who says it’s important, “’to know who you are and not be pretending to be somebody else – not trying too hard. Knowing who you are and being fine with that.’”

Of course such self-awareness is not easy; Lulu actually compares the process to picking wild blackberries, “bare-armed combat with long brambles that rake your skin, as hard to go backwards as forwards once you’ve worked your way into the patch.” Learning about what is most important and becoming our true selves is like taking maple sap and turning it into maple syrup, a process of refining forty litres to make one litre. As described in the novel, it takes a lot of work.

As expected, Lulu does experience personal growth. She realizes that she is like the village of Snow Road Station which has changed over the years, its “importance off to the side.” It is now “a place that must have had bigger plans for itself in the beginning [but]now seemed happy in its modesty – a field flower.” It is not important to justify or impress: “All you have to do . . . is put yourself in the way of beauty, put yourself into the incredible swing of it” and be “part of an orchestration of movement that had no end.”

Perhaps the secret is “paying attention to all the life around her that wasn’t paying the least regard to her.” Lulu discovers a world of peace and beauty which the author succeeds in describing so beautifully: “Colours not seen all winter reappeared in the sky – shades of pink that floated high and loose like Easter hats, like flowers. At dawn the snow was faint-pink as the sun rose, and the woods themselves were light-filled, yet full of long shadows and air in subtle motion. . . . Hemlock needles dusted the surface of the snow, as did beech leaves whitened by winter winds and only now letting go. Even when overcast, the woods were bright. It was like being inside an opal.”

The novel also examines relationships. There is more than one difficult relationship; for instance, Lulu and Nan didn’t see each other for 25 years. Because there is a lack of open communication, misunderstandings occur and connections suffer. Based on a comment Nan made years earlier, Lulu thinks Nan judged her harshly but the truth is that she spoke out of hurt and jealousy. All it takes to repair fractured relationships is an openness: “It takes so little. The smallest effort and barriers fall.”

There are so many reasons to like this book, though I was most drawn to its thematic depth and lyrical prose. Also I can identify with an older protagonist coming to terms with aging. I highly recommend it.

Bringing back a colourful character from His Whole Life, Snow Station Road is the story of Lulu Blake — a talented actress, now in her mid-sixties, having to face the fact that she will never make the big time — and as Lulu returns to her hometown for a wedding, reuniting with old friends and family will force Lulu to consider what sorts of things she sacrificed in her lifelong quest for the acknowledgement and applause of strangers. Attending the wedding allows Lulu to not only reconnect with her best friend Nan (who looks like she has everything figured out) and her brother Guy (who definitely does not), but she also mixes with the younger generation; all struggling to figure themselves out at the beginning of their adulthood as Lulu reaches the final act of her own This is a novel of characters, their interactions and conversations, and the plot arc mostly follows Lulu’s soul growth. I admit that that sounds like a quiet novel — and it is — but it may be the only thing worth writing about. A simply lovely read.

Delighted to include this title in the April edition of Novel Encounters, my regular column highlighting the month’s most anticipated fiction, for the Books section of Zoomer magazine. (see column and mini-review at link)

Love anything Elizabeth Hay writes. She always has such strong but relatable characters. The "behind the scenes" with a stage actor was interesting, as was the whole maple sugar info.

I have read most of Elizabeth Hay's books and I realize how good she is at depicting people who really know one another well--mothers and daughters, lovers and ex-lovers, old friends. This is a narratively quiet book in which an actress messes up during a performance of Beckett and heads to her friend Nan's in the wood in order to lick her wounds. She finds there a world of beauty and peace and people who matter to her and for whom she too matters. There is some idealizing of this life but it is a wonderfully seductive one. Read this book when you are in a pensive mood and are looking for good company--not to mention the sound of maple sap dripping into buckets.

Elizabeth Hay writes evocative books that delve deep into the human character, and Snow Road Station is no exception. Anyone who has ever enjoyed one of the author's previous novels will enjoy this story of an aging actress who returns to her roots and learns about herself, her connections with others, and what she really wants from this life.

I very much appreciated the older narrator and the quiet pull of the story toward a satisfying conclusion - not to mention the spot-on descriptions of maple syrup-making!

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read the electronic ARC in advance of publication.