Title: Lost Lake Author: Sarah Addison Allen
Published: January 21, 2014
Genre(s): Magical Realism
Page Count: 304
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:The first time Eby Pim saw Lost Lake, it was on a picture postcard. Just an old photo and a few words on a small square of heavy stock, but when she saw it, she knew she was seeing her future.
That was half a life ago. Now Lost Lake is about to slip into Eby's past. Her husband George is long passed. Most of her demanding extended family are gone. All that's left is a once-charming collection of lakeside cabins succumbing to the Southern Georgia heat and damp, and an assortment of faithful misfits drawn back to Lost Lake year after year by their own unspoken dreams and desires.
It's a lot, but not enough to keep Eby from relinquishing Lost Lake to a developer with cash in hand, and calling this her final summer at the lake. Until one last chance at family knocks on her door.
Lost Lake is where Kate Pheris spent her last best summer at the age of twelve, before she learned of loneliness, and heartbreak, and loss. Now she's all too familiar with those things, but she knows about hope too, thanks to her resilient daughter Devin, and her own willingness to start moving forward. Perhaps at Lost Lake her little girl can cling to her own childhood for just a little longer... and maybe Kate herself can rediscover something that slipped through her fingers so long ago.
One after another, people find their way to Lost Lake, looking for something that they weren't sure they needed in the first place: love, closure, a second chance, peace, a mystery solved, a heart mended. Can they find what they need before it's too late?
While Sarah Addison Allen’s novels are never bad, I found Lost Lake to be my least favorite thus far. It’s a nice story, but it lacks the energy and memorability of the author’s previous efforts. Honestly, it was almost…disappointing.
The book is, more or less, about a group of women and how they, if you’ll allow the cliché, “find themselves” at Lost Lake campground in the south Georgia swamps. The main character is Kate, who’s recently pushed herself out of depression after her husband’s death, and has come to Lost Lake hoping to connect to her past. Lost Lake also has several other narrating characters who offer their own stories to the mix, and the general theme seems to be about people who “save” other people through some act or another. Which is a nice unifying theme, I think.
I’ve always felt that Allen’s novels are too short, and I felt that extreme brevity quite keenly in Lost Lake, probably because it felt like a negative thing in this case. Usually with this author, I simply want more from these characters, but that lack of material doesn’t affect how I already feel about them. With this book, I felt that Allen never managed to develop things as fully as she could, so a lot of this book felt somewhat shortchanged.
Lost Lake was also less-than in its magical realism. Allen doesn’t write heavy-handedly, but usually there’s a very discernable sense of magic present in the environment, which I didn’t think was the case here. There were a few elements with a alligator and magic love charms, but, again, they weren’t expanded upon in the way that they could have been.
Altogether, Lost Lake was a decent novel, but it didn’t blow me away. Sarah Addison Allen has done better work, so not finding that same quality in this novel was a disappointment. I’m hoping future books of hers will live up to the standard she’s set for herself, and not seem so undercooked like this novel did.
