Book review: The Woman Who Swallowed West Hawk Lake by Deborah Schnitzer

The Woman who Swallowed West Hawk Lake
by Deborah Schnitzer
London, ON: Ardith Publishing
2026
available through Amazon

Review by Amanda Le Rougetel

This highly original and creative novel, presented in multiple layers of memory and textual artifacts, challenged me to think beyond what I expect to see on the pages of a book, and to hand myself and my reading experience over to the unfolding storylines within its cover.

Two young children, a girl and a boy, suffer a sense of isolation from their extended family members when their mother is taken ill and taken away from them. When they visit her, they sense she is no longer the mother they thought she was to them. Meanwhile, the man they call ‘nazi’ — spelled lower case when referenced by the children but upper case when the adults discuss him — is hanging around, apparently taking photographs. Why? Who is he? And what has really happened to their mother?

The children’s deepening sense of unease is coupled with a growing understanding of the long-ago horrors and injustices that the girl has learned about from films viewed with her needy gullible aunt and through “the Child”, an apparition they choose to trust. The boy is younger and more innocent, but no less wise and no less keen to seek understanding of what is transpiring on the shores of West Hawk Lake.

The setting is real, as is the historical background out of which arises this story. Hitler and all his evils, including the Lebensborn children engineered through Aryan-pure women, interweave their historical facts in this tale of children increasingly wise to a history that, though never told to them by their parents or grandparents, nonetheless shapes them, underpinning what is transpiring in their lives today.

History, when looked at square in the face, challenges us. So, too, does this novel. Take the challenge Deborah Schnitzer lays before us. Open the pages to reckon with that past and confront its everlasting impression on the present. The two children of the novel are resilient and relentless; they know what they know despite their adults’ protestations. The world in which we live today might be a better place if we listened more to children who insist they know something wicked and disturbing, who claim to have something important to say — and less to adults professing to know better despite hidden truths and half lies.

I am a long-time reader of Deborah Schnitzer's literary work, and rarely does her writing not challenge me — if not by content, then by form, structure and plot. With each reading of new work by her, I am reminded that a powerful writer puts words to the page not merely for entertainment but for reckoning with difficult stories that, often, have shaped their own particular world. A personal backstory, then, underpins what appears on the pages of this novel. Deborah’s late husband lost his family to the Holocaust and lived his life with the hauntings of this personal history. Deborah pledged to him that she would bring the essence of the story to life through a novel, and that novel exists today after years of work and reworking. I celebrate this remarkable achievement.

Read this novel not because it is easy, but because the multi-layered story it tells disturbs, holds, and lingers in the mind and the heart — all things an important novel should do.

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