Mistik Lake

Katie MacNichol portrays the tangled lives of three women who are impacted by love, secrets, and death. As a teen, Sally was the sole survivor of a tragic car accident on Mistik Lake. Now her daughter, Odella, must cope with her mother's alcoholism and then with her abandonment. Sally's Aunt Gloria tries to hold the family together while hiding the secret of her own lesbian love life. The mysteries that are eventually unveiled about each woman draw the survivors closer. MacNichol handles the varying points of view beautifully, fully revealing characters, and even depicts settings as if they were characters. MacNichol's characters age gracefully in voice--except for Odella's whiny youngest sibling, whose tone is irritating but understandably so in view of her mother's abandonment. D.P.D. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

Starred review from September 3, 2007
Brooks's (True Confessions of a Heartless Girl
) keenly observed novel interweaves the lives of three generations of women overshadowed by secrets. While the narrative focuses on Odella, whose mother leaves the family (and the country) with a lover, then unexpectedly dies, the author also rotates through the perspectives of other characters. It falls to Odella's great-aunt Gloria as much as to Odella, the oldest of three sisters, to give readers a sense of Sally, Odella's guilt-ridden mother. Mistik Lake plays an important role: Sally alone survived a tragic accident on the lake as a teenager, and the small Canadian community, where both Gloria and Sally grew up, serves as the backdrop for the major revelations in the book. Readers may have trouble tracking all the ways various characters connect; the grandfather of Odella's first love, Jimmy, tells her, “We are all related, one way or another, if you go far enough back,” and it certainly seems to be the case given how the characters' histories intersect. But all of the characters seem distinct and real, thanks to the author's exceptional skill with details (Odella watches Jimmy's grandmother prepare breakfast: “She begins to move around her kitchen—silently, like a ship with sails. I can see the ancestors in her face”). Everyone suffers, but the momentum remains steady and, in the end, it is the author's ability to convey the characters' love for one another, as complicated as it often is, that floats to the top. Ages 14-up.