Garden Lakes

February 15, 2016
Charlie Martens recounts an ill-fated high school program that haunts him into adulthood. Clarke (World Gone Water, 2015, etc.) develops the memorable protagonist of his previous two novels while crafting a story that stands on its own. The novel proceeds through two interwoven narratives. In one, Charlie, a junior at Randolph, an all-boys prep school, is selected to participate in a summer leadership program at Garden Lakes, an unfinished housing development in the Arizona desert. In the second, an adult Charlie is a successful newspaper columnist in Phoenix. Undercurrents of greed and self-interest unite the strands of the novel, from the creation of the fellowship on property donated by a Randolph graduate trying to keep it from being seized by the government to Charlie's career-defining investigative reporting, which sparked legislation but was predicated on deception. There is imbalance and unevenness to the plotlines, however. The present action, narrated in the third person, reads as a series of brief and incomplete interruptions. Yet the distant past unfolds in a strange first-person omniscient. Charlie is largely hidden behind the wide cast of teenage boys whose every thought and action he somehow knows. Nonetheless, it is this dramatic storyline that gives the novel its pulse. As the summer progresses, old and new rifts divide the boys into fighting factions. Abandoned by their advisers and with a heat wave reaching unbearable levels, the structured schedule breaks into fast-paced chaos reminiscent of Lord of the Flies. Charlie, an orphan and transfer student, does not appeal for pity. Still, we see that he is implicated in these events largely in an attempt to fit in. An intriguing cross-section of loneliness and power in the world of boys and men.

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March 1, 2016
An homage of sorts to William Golding's classic Lord of the Flies, this third volume in a trilogy about Arizona newspaper columnist Charlie Martens revisits the protagonist's adolescence and the 40 days he spent at Garden Lakes, a half-built housing development gone bust. Charlie and a group of his fellow prep-school students are given the job of helping to build a house there, the school now owning the property. But when their two teachers are forced by circumstance to leave the boys unchaperoned, order quickly breaks down. Meanwhile, the story has flashed forward to Charlie at 37, in trouble for a controversial column he plans to write. This secondary story is oddly truncated and inconclusive, though it might make more sense if one has read the first two volumes of the trilogy.Happily, the principal story is more coherent. Although it's no Lord of the Flies, it does offer a reasonably astute study in the darker aspects of adolescent psychology. Golding fans will be the principal audience for this occasionally tepid reimagining.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)