May 29, 2025

Cattail Lane, by Fran Kimmel

If the warm and gorgeous cover of Fran Kimmel’s Cattail Lane invites you in, then you’re likely going to love this book, a story of unconventional family and community that begins with Nick, aimless and drifting, receiving the news out of nowhere that he has a 14-year-old son, Billy, and that he’s been charged with the boy’s care now that his grandmother’s dementia has progressed where she needs to enter a care home. Both Billy and his grandmother, Evie, come to live in Nick’s small town, not far from the shores of the lake he grew up beside, and where he made a mistake years ago that he has yet to atone for.

Billy is resentful and standoffish, and no wonder. He seeks solace in visits with his grandmother in the dementia ward where she lives now, and where he’s drawn to Sarah, who works there, and whom Nick is drawn toward too, though for different reasons. With Sarah’s support, Billy and his artist grandmother begin a project to enliven the halls of the dementia ward with murals of nature (drawn from Nick’s photographs of the lake’s short and wetlands), and it’s a project that changes the atmosphere of the ward and shows Billy that he might be able to find a way to belong in his new life, and with Nick.

There are no straightforward villains in this novel (though a few contenders for the title, it’s true), instead a bunch of flawed and broken people who’d like to be trying their best, but can’t always manage to pull it off, which is everyone, from time-to-time. And in the generous world of this novel, redemption is possible, goodness is just beneath the core, and beauty is everywhere, if you only have the eye to see it.