A review by gef
A Student of Weather by Elizabeth Hay

4.0

In 1937, when she is 8 years old, dark, homely and unloved little Norma Joyce falls in love with a handsome stranger 15 years her senior. The problem is, so does her beautiful 16-year old sister Lucinda. Maurice Dove has come to the family's farmhouse in the Saskatchewan prairie to study the weather during the long dry spell. He is charming, weak-willed, and utterly oblivious to the havoc he leaves behind him. Norma Joyce will spend the next decades, in Ottawa and New York City, seeking and partially finding the love she was denied by Maurice -- who fathers her son -- and her embittered father Ernest, who ends up dying in her care and wishing she were Lucinda. It's a story of sibling rivalry, prairie hardship, weather, many kinds of trees, and growing wiser. It's beautifully told.