Born into a basket of clean sheets--ruining a perfectly good load of
laundry--Emmeline never quite fit in on her family's rural Nova Scotian
farm. After suffering multiple losses in the First World War, her family
became so heavy with grief, toxicity, and mental illness that Emmeline
felt their weight smothering her. And so, she fled across the Atlantic
and built her life in England. Now she is retired and living in a small
coastal town with her best friend, Vera, an excellent conversationalist.
Vera is also a small white dog, and so Emmeline is making an effort to
talk to more humans. When she joins a memoir-writing course at the
library, her classmates don't know what to make of her. Funny, loud, and
with a riveting memoir, she charms the lot. As her past unfolds for her
audience, friendships form, a bonus in a rather lonely life. She even
shares with them her third-biggest secret: she has liberated hundreds of
spoons over her lifetime--from the local library, Cary Grant, Winston
Churchill. She is a compulsive spoon stealer.
When Emmeline unexpectedly inherits the farm she grew up on, she knows
she needs to leave her new friends and go see the farm and what remains
of her family one last time. She arrives like a tornado in their lives,
an off-kilter Mary Poppins bossing everyone around and getting quite a
lot wrong. But with her generosity and hard-earned wisdom, she gets an
awful lot right too. A pinball ricocheting between people, offending and
inspiring in equal measure, Emmeline, in her final years, believes that
a spoonful--perhaps several spoonfuls--of kindness can set to rights the
family so broken by loss and secrecy.
The Spoon Stealer is a classic Crewe book: full of humour, family
secrets, women's friendship, lovable animals, and immense heart.
