Looking For The Klondike Stone

Like many people, I have a small select shelf of books set aside for re-reading each summer … This shelf holds The Wind in The Willows, Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, Owen Johnson’s Lawrenceville Stories, and now Looking for the Klondike Stone, an absolutely enchanting work that deserves a place by every hammock from Rehoboth to Rockaway Beach…This is a work of nearly Proustian intensity, a sort of a la recherche du camp perdu . . . Arthur’s ability to convey the impressions of her childhood is eerie, almost supernatural. Her prose is lyrical, laced with the melancholy that comes from an adult’s knowledge that paradise is always lost and wilderness once despoiled does not return. But her writing is whimsical, too, and sometimes almost surreally funny . . . The last pages of her book were so lovely, so sad and true in their evocation of beauty and childhood and loss that I had tears in my eyes and I bet you will, too . . . Those of us too old for Wynakee have Elizabeth Arthur’s wonderful gift of Looking for the Klondike Stone, a distillation of the best summer you ever knew: literary alchemy at its most magical.

Elizabeth Hand, Washington Post Book World, June 20, 1993