Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

Housekeeping is a very strange and unexpected novel. It tells the story of two little girls who go to live with their grandmother after their mother commits suicide. The years the girls spend with their grandmother are orderly and safe, compared to their years with the mother. After about five years, though, their grandmother dies and they are cared for briefly by her elderly and fairly odd sisters.

The elderly sisters don't feel up to raising a couple of little girls, so they send a letter to the girls' aunt Sylvie, who shows up to care for them. The problem is that Sylvie is a drifter who doesn't really know how to settle down and care for two little girls. For Ruth--the little girl who is the primary narrator of the book--Sylvie is a kindred spirit, but for her more conventional sister Lucille, Sylvie is a disaster.

Housekeeping is a beautifully written novel with a fully realized sense of place. The following quote is a sample of its haunting perfection.

"To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is foreshadowing--the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries." pp. 152-153

Housekeeping was published in 1981. Marilynne Robinson wrote a second book, Gilead, that was published in 2005. Here is a website that discusses both books.

http://www.therevealer.org/archives/timeless_001690.php

A movie was made with the book as source--it is also called Housekeeping. I haven't seen it, and it's not out in DVD, but there is information about it on the IMDB.com site.