Summit Avenue
Reviews

Publishers Weekly, March 20, 2000, starred review

In this remarkable debut, Minnesota native Sharratt-coordinator of the Munich Writers Workshop-weaves dark, evocative fairy tales and passionate longings into an incandescent coming-of-age story. Orphaned by the age of 16, German native Kathrin Albrecht is sent to America in 1912, where she barely ekes out a living sewing flour bags for the Pillsbury Mill in Minneapolis. Finding sanctuary in an antique bookstore, she befriends the owner, Jan Jelinik, and his nephew, John, who, as immigrants, face similar struggles. While John troubles Kathrin by reminding her of her outsider status, he also introduces the young woman to one of his wealthy American customers, Violet Waverly. A professor’s widow, Violet hires Kathrin to assist her with one of her husband’s unfinished projects-translating foreign fairy tales-offering her salary, room and board in the Waverly home on Summit Avenue, an upper-class enclave of St. Paul, and irrevocably transforming Kathrin’s world. The two lonely women forge an unusual connection that grows into a symbiotic companionship, fulfilling needs that neither individual fully discloses until Violet crosses a line that abruptly forces Kathrin into a relationship with John. As Kathrin’s emotional world crumbles around her, she finds an inner strength and discovers the answer to her yearning for a genuine loving relationship. Sharratt infuses Kathrin’s story with sensuality, insight and poetic observation: "Flat-bottomed, curly-topped prairie clouds were sailing like steamships across the deep blue sky." These and other haunting images, as well as her inspired use of folklore and mythology, add depth to this potent tale.

Amazon.com, Regina Marler

Kathrin Albrecht’s childhood in Germany at the turn of the century was so relentlessly grim that she endures the hardships of her new life in America-sewing flour bags for pennies, sharing a bed at a boarding house-without complaint. Eventually, she takes night classes in English. She begins to haunt second-hand book shops, and here catches the eye of a professor’s widow, Violet Waverly, who turns out to be both the fairy godmother and the prince of this complex and subtle Cinderella tale. Mary Sharratt’s debut has almost none of the typical faults of first novels. Her language is lush but controlled, her narrative carefully paced. Nothing is rushed or condensed. Recognizing the young woman’s intelligence, and intrigued by her thirst for knowledge, Violet hires Kathrin for a few months’ work translating and typing the German fairy tales that her dead husband had collected. She also offers her a room in her mansion on Summit Avenue. Kathrin enters the magical world of the fairy tales and of her beautiful new surroundings with the same breathless sense of surrender. As she works, the tales become part of her: layers and layers inside me. "What I would take with me when I left this house was far more precious than the ability to type. The tales would become my secret treasure. . . . I knew I was living under a spell but no longer resisted it. It covered me like a wave, sweeping me off the shore and drawing me deep into the ocean." As with all fairy tales, there is no smooth, sunlit path for Kathrin-or even for Violet, whom she must betray-but there is at least the promise of a happy ending.

Booklist, April 15, 2000

Sharratt’s unusual novel is a wondrous combination of imagination and real life as she weaves Greek myth and Eastern European fairy tales into the story of a young German girl, Kathrin, who immigrates to America after the death of her mother. First, Kathrin finds a job sewing cloth bags for the Pillsbury flour mill, thanks to the assistance of her cousin Lotte, a miserable job that Kathrin longs to escape. Then, in an attempt to become more employable, Kathrin goes to night school to learn English, which enables her to obtain a job translating German fairy tales for a widow who wants to complete a manuscript that her late husband left behind. As Kathrin comes to know Violet, her new employer, the two women become friends and, eventually, lovers. Sensuous and deeply moving, this stunning first novel explores traditional roles for women and their mythic counterparts, as well as the theme of initiation into womanhood as it is expressed in the myth of Persephone and the stories of Baba Yaga.

Minneapolis Star Tribune, July 23, 2000

A Sense of history for Minnesota women

Two new novels use a feminist lens to examine Minnesota women’s lives in the 20th century. The better effort, "Summit Avenue," is an ambitious first novel by Minneapolis native Mary Sharratt. It’s the story of Kathrin, a German immigrant who comes of age in the Twin Cities during World War I. Hired by a professor’s widow who lives on Summit Avenue, Kathrin translates European fairy tales. The two fall in love, a painful, scandalous romance Sharratt constructs without using the word "lesbian."

But it’s more complicated than that. Kathrin also loves an immigrant man whom she marries. The harsh realities she faces lead to a surprising conclusion we won’t give away.

Kathrin’s story would be merely a sad romance with a twist if it weren’t interwoven with fairy tales that illuminate it. Tales of maidens and hags, terror and magic take on fresh clarity and power in this unusual context.

Kathrin sees many parallels between her life and those of the characters in the fairy tales she translates. Like their authors, she tells her story by "gathering the scattered threads and weaving them together, as if on a magic loom. Weaving them into . . . my tale. This is how I mend what was broken, how I summon back the radiant thing I have lost."

Sharratt’s writing has a major weak point-dialogue. All the characters sound alike, a flaw in a book about people of many nations and backgrounds.

Still, this is a poignant novel, and appealing in its well-researched early-20th-century settings-stately Summit Avenue, gritty mills, bawdy Nordeast bars.

-Reviewed by Pamela Miller

The Roanoke Times, Sunday, July 16, 2000

FOLKLORE AND REALITY BLEND

Reviewed by Lynn Eckman

Lyrical and lovely. Summit Avenue touches the heart and remains

in the mind like a haunting melody. Combining fairy tales with gritty reality, this first novel is a story about growing up, about values, above all about love in all its guises.

At the turn of the past century, American offered endless possibilites for

the tired, the poor, the ambitious. Among many other immigrants, Kathrin Albrecht arrives here from Germany with great hope but no one to help in the new world except her cousin Lotte, a mill worker in Minneapolis. They share a room, sleeping in the same bed, yet differ completely in their aspirations and dreams. Lotte is searching for domesticity, Katrin for education, for autonomy, for herself.

One day she wanders into Jan Jelinek's book shop, a haven from the dreary

life she leads, and it is there that she first sees Violet Waverly, a beautiful, childless widow. Violet offers Katrin a job translating her late husband's works, also inviting Kathrin to live in her sumptuous home. Like Cinderella, Katrin is attracted by beatuy, aut all does not end happily-ever-after for her. A disturbing incident bares Violet's love for her, and Katrin flees, marries Jan's nephew and has a daughter. A new life begins for her, one filled with physical abuse, with anguish, regret and

betrayal. And always she remembers Summit Avenue, its tranquility and repose.

Fleeing to a cabin in the woods, Katrin tries to create another life for

herself and her child, wondering about Violet who has disappeared.

Reality and folklore blend seamlessly in this story, making it difficult to

distinguish one from the other. Clearly the two do not vary greatly. Mary

Sharratt enchants and amazes as she spins her tale, turning straw into gold.

Lambda Book Report, May 2000

The Myth That’s the American Dream

Reviewed by Judith Katz

How do lesbian fiction writers tell our lives at the start of the twenty-first century? Do we thrust ourselves into the future as science fiction writers Nicola Griffith, Melissa Scott, and Severna Park have done? Or do we travel in the opposite direction, imagining back to a time when there was no language through which we could express our true natures, even to ourselves? Novelists Elana Dykewoman and Patricia Powell have envisioned complicated lives of heroines pas in Beyond the Pale and The Pagoda respectively. With her first novel, Summit Avenue, Mary Sharratt joins the lesbian cultural excavation party with the tale of a German orphan who comes to America as a teenager. There she settles and grows into an adult storyteller and a lover of women, in this case, one elusive woman in particular.

At the insistence of an uncle, Kathrin Albrecht leaves Germany for Minnesota at the start of the twentieth century. At her mother’s funeral, he tells her, "I didn’t spend all those years educating you just to have you marry some farmer who’ll treat you no better than a brood mare." Such had been her mother’s fate: "pregnant every other year" until her father died.

So Kathrin sets off for Minneapolis, where she lives in a dingy boarding house with her cousin Lotte, whom she joins as a seamstress in the dreary Pillsbury Mills.

Soon Kathrin, who is fond of books and especially fairy tales, sees herself through night school. She learns English and eventually finds a respite from her life off drudgery in a used bookstore by the university. The owner, an elderly immigrant himself, has a nephew, John, who takes an interest in Kathrin. John, is well acclimated to his American life and arranges for Kathrin to find a job with the elegant Violet Waverly, so that Kathrin might advance herself and leave the mill behind. Mrs. Waverly lives on St. Paul’s posh Summit Avenue, and when Kathrin sees Violet’s home for the first time, her real-life fairy tale begins: "Her house was like a castle built of golden limestone, with turrets and lancet windows half hidden in ivy. I stopped at the wrought iron gate and stared. Every residence on Summit Avenue was a mansion, each one grander than the next. The house was not the biggest or the most ostentatious, but I was afraid to step forward. Going through that gate would be like walking into a mirage. If I quietly turned around and caught the streetcar home, it would always remain perfect, like a remembered dream, an apparition that would sustain me every day for the rest of my life."

But of course, Kathrin does enter the enchanted castle, and from that point forward, like that of any good fairy tale heroine, her life is changed forever.

Kathrin’s new employer, Violet, is both stately and mysterious. Her past holds many secrets, at least one of them tragic. But with the character of Violet, Mary Sharratt has also invented an early twentieth-century pacifist feminist, an adventurer and explorer. Kathrin’s stay on Summit Avenue gives the young woman a taste of a world more sophisticated and luxurious than any she’s known. But the combination of her youth and her inability to decipher Violet’s ambiguous story puts Kathrin on unequal footing with her mistress. She is alternately Violet’s prize student and her servant. Eventually she becomes Violet’s lover (and her betrayer as well).

When she finally runs away from Violet’s not-entirely-unwanted sexual advances and her majestic domain, Kathrin finds herself squarely in the middle of real life early twentieth-century hardship. She endures sexual harassment at the hands of her new boss; she has an unwanted pregnancy; and resolves her compromised position with an unhappy heterosexual marriage to John. In fairy tale spirit, Sharratt has arranged it so that Kathrin must overcome these trials before she can come in to her own right as a matriarch and magician.

Mary Sharratt tells her tale well, mixing history with good old-fashioned story telling. Her use of fairy tales to underline Kathrin’s life experience gives the story a real richness. She has created a legend out of Kathrin Albrecht’s imagined life, and given us hope that having stood her trials, the princess in the story will find her womanly match and meet her at last.

St. Paul Pioneer Press, June 6, 2000

Summit Avenue author uses fairy tales to break through cliches

Mary Sharratt’s debut novel, Summit Avenue, is about a woman who finds love in the Twin Cities just before World War I. But Sharratt, who grew up in Bloomington, wrote the story in Germany.

"I was writing in a basement study in Munich, but I was remembering the Victorian house I lived in at University and Western in 1985,," Sharratt said in a telephone interview. "My run-down neighborhood was within walking distance of Summit Avenue, and those mansions stuck in my mind."

In Summit Avenue, a young German woman named Kathrin immigrates to Minnesota, getting a miserable job sewing sacks at a Minneapolis flour mill. Then she meets Violet, the beautiful and sophisticated widow of a college professor, and moves into Violet’s Summit Avenue mansion so she can translate a book about fairy tales that the older woman is writing.

Kathrin, who was raised on fairy tales, sees Violet as a magical sorceress and seems to fall under her spell. But when Kathrin realizes she and Violet are physically attracted to one another, she flees the mansion and marries.

Her life after that is hard, but she lives by telling the old fairy tales to her daughter. In the end, she realizes that gentle Violet will be part of her life forever.

Poet Many Sivers says that this novel "while apparently telling of a lesbian relationship, is talking even more about the flight back into the mythic depths of womanhood-the pre-Christian, woman-centered community.

Sharratt says that’s exactly the terrain she wanted to explore. That’s why the book is divided into three sections that reflect mythic stages of women’s-maiden, woman, and crone.

She points out that neither Violet nor Kathrin knew what to call their relationship, since the word "lesbian" wasn’t used in their era.

"That’s my point in writing the book," Sharratt says.

"Kathrin had no frame of reference for her feelings about Violet. She could only fall back on fairy tales, seeing the older woman as an enchantress who casts a spell. What I was interested in was putting their relationship in a historical context, breaking through contemporary cliches of sexual definitions."

Sharratt has lived in Europe for 12 years, but she has family in Minnesota. Her mother, Adelene, is a retired Control Data employee who lives in Bloomington, and her dad, Elwood, worked for Minnegasco and is in a nursing home.

Writing has been an important part of Sharratt’s life since her junior year at Lincoln High School in Bloomington, where she learned the joys of publishing when poet Ruth Roston helped her and another girl put together a poetry chapbook.

She worked her way through the University of Minnesota, where she studied German and English, saving enough money to spend her junior year in Freiburg, Germany. When she graduated in 1988,she got a Fulbright Fellowship to teach in Innsbruck, Austria, then moved to Munich to teach creative writing and coordinate the Munich Writers Workshop. She and her partner live in Grafing, a town of 10,000 in the beautiful part of southern Germany near the Alps.

Sharratt stopped writing during her college years, but she began again when she got her first teaching job in Germany and didn’t like it very much.

"I started writing in the evenings to get more creativity into my life," she recalls. "I had no how-to book, no writers’ group. I was on my own, starting from scratch."

The story of Violet and Kathrin "took root in my life and kept retelling itself," she says. "My experience as a foreigner in Germany was mirrored in the story of a German immigrant in Minneapolis. I put into the book all my estrangement. From this distance, Minnesota seemed like a longed-for place that I wanted to re-create."

The novel’s fairy-tale motif was born when Sharratt was teaching English to Japanese children and fairy tales were the only written materials she could find.

"I fell in love with fairy tales," she says. "They are intended to give depth to Kathrin’s story because I didn’t want it to be just a love story or immigrant story or coming-of-age. I wanted to go deeper, like an archetypal fable."

In her reading of fairy tales, Sharratt found that tales from many European countries feature the same characters.

"Originally, fairy tales were adult entertainment, told to pass long winter’s evenings. Some were quite bawdy and sometimes obscene," she explains. "It wasn’t until the 18th century that the educated classes rejected fairy tales because of supernatural and irrational aspects and decided they were old wives’ tales fit only for entertaining small children."

In Summit Avenue,Sharratt gives fairy tales back to adult women.