Mistik Lake
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Canadian Library Association YA Book of the Year
In 1981, sixteen-year-old Sally McLean is in a car full of teenagers when it plunges through the ice to the bottom of Mistik Lake. Sally is the only survivor.
Many years later, Sally's teenaged daughter, Odella, is left wondering whether the accident is to blame for her mother's life as a sad alcoholic who eventually abandons her family and flees to Iceland with another man. When Sally suddenly dies in an accident, Odella, her father and her two younger sisters are almost overwhelmed with grief and confusion, until three people provide help and healing in unexpected ways.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
