<blockquote>Val had lost hope.
Routine carried her where hope had stopped: up the stairs to tend the lamp. Into the forest for wood, apples, berries, more rarely a deer or a grouse. Her stores of magic and wild rice came from the same place, though not from the same method: the smaller, murky inland lake, the one too small to need a lighthouse, only the canoes and the flat-bottom boats of the rice harvest.</blockquote>
➤ I enjoy how the story never tells you directly what horrible thing it was that happened in the past, you just get to see the results of it.
➤ (Author says it's set on the north shore of Lake Superior, which is absolutely correct.)
