Review: "The Lake House" by Sarah Beth Durst

 

The Lake House by Sarah Beth Durst
Published April 2023 via HarperTeen
★★★★

Three girls arrive at a summer camp deep in the woods in Maine—but nobody's there. The camp is a battered, burnt-out ruin, and the only person they can find is dead. With nobody around to get them out, it's up to them to figure out: who did this? And why? And what will it take for the three of them to survive?

I've read a number of books of late in which it's clear that one of the main characters must have been the perpetrator, and this is basically the opposite: Claire and Mariana and Reyva arrived together, on the same boat—so there are few things of which they are certain, but they know without a doubt that none of them is responsible. They know they can trust each other. As a platonic-friendship story, then, it's fantastic: the girls are all very different, and under normal circumstances they probably wouldn't be friends...but these are not normal circumstances. This is late nights in the woods, in the rain, desperately needing a way to collect water and a way to find food; this is knowing that they aren't alone in the woods, and that nobody is coming to save them, and they'll need to save themselves. Mariana is a girly-girl with a deep love of old cars, and Reyva has gotten used to years of quelling her emotions, and Claire is terrified that her panic attacks will break them apart—and right now, they're all each other has.

I love a mystery that scares me, that makes me afraid that someone is, you know, stalking me through the woods and could slit my throat any minute now. I want to be afraid for the characters, but I want to be so lost in the story that I'm afraid for myself too. And The Lake House gripped me by the throat for the first twenty-one chapters. I was so deep in it that I barely registered the world around me as I walked through my neighborhood with my nose deep in my e-reader, and I jumped every time I caught another person moving in my peripheral vision.

What I didn't love: there's a twist. It's one that will work brilliantly for some readers, and I think it's best to go in not knowing, so I won't get more detailed than that—but it's the sort of twist that neutralizes a lot of the fear for me. I finished the book in a day and slept like a baby, but I sort of wish that I'd read only halfway before calling it a night, and then finished the next day, so that I could have had a bit of that wide-awake-can't-sleep-is-that-something-at-the-window feeling. (I know. It's a personal problem.)

So...not a home run for me, but I can and do happily recommend this for anyone who wants a deep-in-the-woods type of mystery (it's one of my favorite sorts, along with the stuck-in-a-rambling-old-mansion type) with an emphasis on platonic friendship and girls working together.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.