Summary

Chapter 1: The first chapter introduces a number of characters and concepts important to the story. The story opens with the narrator traveling by car to what is called the “north country” of her birthplace, an isolated island on a lake near a small village in rural Canada. She begins her story in the first lines by suggesting she cannot believe she is traveling the road of her childhood. Though the village of her youth was barely a town and more of an outpost to the truly isolated Canadian wilderness, she sees that it has grown and changed. The narrator’s next subject of her near stream-of-consciousness style is of her first memory of her brother in a restaurant the group drives by.

Though the narrator travels with three companions whom she calls friends, she has only known them for a few months. The narrator first...