A book review from The Movie Snob:

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (1980). I had never heard of this novel or this author until I started reading reviews for Robinson’s new novel, Gilead. Every review contained gushing praise for Housekeeping, and one reviewer even called it one of the ten best American novels of the twentieth century. So I decided to check it out, and I thought it was a pretty good book. It’s about a girl named Ruth, her younger sister Lucille, and their unusual extended family. One day when they are just little girls, their mother takes them to their grandmother’s house, leaves them on her porch, and apparently commits suicide by driving off a cliff and into the cold depths of Fingerbone Lake. The girls grow up in the little town of Fingerbone, cared for first by their grandmother, then briefly by two great-aunts, and then by their aunt Sylvie, an eccentric free-spirit who was basically a hobo before having responsibility for the two girls thrust upon her. The book is as much about mood and atmosphere as it is about plot, and the lake (glacier-carved out of the mountains long ago in a remote and wild part of Idaho) is virtually another character in the book. Definitely worth a look.