Lake People

February 25, 2013
Perhaps if the many characters and tragedies of this debut had been partitioned off into separate novels or stories, they would have had a better chance at sympathy or sustained interest. As it is, this novel drowns in pathos. Alice, adopted as an infant and haunted by her birth family and ancestors, tells her story, their stories, and the stories of the inhabitants of her small New England lake town, Kettleborough, N.H., from early settlers who go back several generations to more direct players in her melancholic tale. The plot is driven almost entirely by what comes to feel like a catalog of tragedies: suicides, car accidents, disappearances, a fire, characters oppressed and scorned for their sexual orientation or social status, domestic abuse, a miscarriage, statutory rape, killing. Rather than resonating with depth or greater meaning, however, the results is a book hobbled by tragedy, not helped by an endless foreboding and an often ponderous tone. Characters are forced into inhuman postures in the name of serious subjects. The minimalism of the prose, working against the melodrama, tries to wrestle the book from its accumulated weight. Agent: Eleanor Jackson, Markson Thoma.

December 15, 2012
A woman strives to triangulate her history and identity in a melancholy lake town in this gauzy debut. Alice, the hero of this novel largely set in the '70s and '80s, has spent most of her life not knowing where she came from. Adopted as an infant, she grew up in Kettleborough, a small New Hampshire town where secrets are pervasive but well-kept. What happened, as the reader knows, is that her father died in a car accident--a common occurrence in these pages--and that her mother has ran off. These details aren't invested with much drama, nor is Alice's adult life: Her adolescence was marked by an ill-advised relationship with a friend of her father's, and the closing third of the book tracks her lovelorn correspondence with a man she's never met. Maxwell labors less on plot than on mood, a blend of modern gothic where men and women are drawn to Kettleborough's lake, often tragically, and a prose style heavy on sober pronouncements and unrealistic dialogue. ("I'm thirteen and already life has become too much," one character utters.) Those flaws might qualify as assets in surer hands, but Maxwell's efforts to give this story an otherworldly quality are undone by its ungainly structure. The novel is arranged much like a collection of linked stories, each bit loosely tethered to the next, and Alice only truly owns the latter half of the book. Earlier chapters are claimed by Alice's grandmother and other relations, and though they share some of Alice's qualities--bad love, the gloomy pull of the lake--none are filled out enough to merit pushing its lead character to the side. Maxwell's passion for storytelling about place and family is obvious, but her command of characters and tone is no match for it.

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September 1, 2012

Abandoned as a babe in a Kettleborough, NH, boathouse, Alice Thornton doesn't know the family she came from, in particular tough Eleonora Olasson. But like Eleonora, Alice is drawn to the dark mysteries of Kettleborough's lake. Maxwell is assistant librarian at the Gilford Public Library, NH.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2013
A powerful sense of place pervades Maxwell's accomplished, if a bit disjointed, debut. The novel tells the bittersweet tale of Alice Thornton, abandoned in the first days of her life in a boathouse in Kettleborough, New Hampshire. Alice is adopted by a childless couple and gradually begins to discover her deep connections to Kettleborough and the potent history of the women in her birth family. Among them is Eleanora, a hardy pioneer who brought her kin to the area, and eccentric Aunt Signe, who nearly drowned in Kettleborough's idyllic lake. As she grows older, Alice longs for acceptance, seeking it with a series of men, none of whom can fill the void in her life: there's Mike, handsome and fascinating but much too old for her; husband Josh, who doesn't love her; and Simon, kind and well meaning, if a bit simple. In New Hampshire native Maxwell's first offering, she slows the story's momentum by shifting back and forth between decades. A more linear narrative might have better suited this otherwise luminous work.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)