Rick Skwiot

Christmas at Long Lake - a Childhood Memory Rick Skwiot

Award-winning novelist Rick Skwiot's critically acclaimed account of a rustically charming yet fateful childhood Christmas, with a family and a nation on the brink of unsettling change and loss of innocence. Christmas at Long Lake returns us to Christmas Day 1953 as seen through the eyes of a child. When the author, as a six-year-old, learns on Christmas Eve that his father's layoff at a steel mill threatens their country home, he works to save it.

Along the way we meet a cast of affecting characters: forbidding grandmothers, tribal country-kids, a destructive vacuum-cleaner salesman, and dutiful and affectionate parents who create an aura of hard yet unfailing love within the author's childhood environs. Skwiot takes us on a sensory and esthetic journey to frozen lakes, frosted fields, squawking jays, and the muted palette of gray Illinois winter afternoons, carrying us into a past of coal stoves, hand-pumps, and independence, as well as to the fragrant markets and redbrick alleys of a segregated St. Louis.

Christmas at Long Lake manages to compress an era into 36 hours and 156 pages. It will likely be read with nostalgic recognition by the author's baby-boomer generation, with longing for simpler times by older Americans, and with some disbelief by younger readers who do not realize how much this nation has changed in 50 years.