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Jane Hudson was a Latin teacher living in a cottage with her daughter at her old school, Heart Lake School for Girls. She had been a scholarship student there twenty years earlier. She had only one close friend, Lucy Toller. She, Lucy, and Lucy's brother Matt had formed a triumvirate to learn enough Latin for her to win the scholarship. Now events seem to be parodying her senior year at school. Pages from her journal, lost or stolen during that year, are appearing. Two students had committed suicide that year and it seems that her current students are going to follow suit. The Latin teacher, Miss Chambers, had been blamed for helping cause the suicides and Jane may follow that lead as well. The book oscillates from the modern story to the events of twenty years before. We learn that Jane was a lonely child, her mother pushing her to do better and then criticizing her for doing so. She had few friends and was pathetically grateful for Lucy's affection. When they went to school they were assigned to a triple room and her mother always told her that three was an unstable relationship. She learned the truth of that. The story emerges bit by bit. We do not learn the entire course of events until the final pages of the novel. Jane's senior year and this, her first year of teaching, are traumatic and frightening, and she is not eager for others to know what happened to her and her two friends. This story catches teenage girls and skewers them like butterflies. The author understands all the emotions and actions that make up a girl trying to survive adolescence. There are the crushes on other girls and on teachers. There is the pain when one of the girls has a boyfriend and you do not. There are the times when the three of you are solid against the world and times when you are left out while the others celebrate. These girls are romantic and naive, sensual and dramatic, believing everything they read and everything their favorite teachers tell them. The story is riveting and engrossing. It is at one and the same time hard to put down and hard to continue because you want it never to end. It is well told and the characters are lovingly and meticulously developed. They could be us and we invest ourselves in their lives. The lake is a character in its own right. The school is on the shores and much of the activity takes place at or around the lake. There is skating in the winter, ice cutting, pageants in the spring and fall. And the weather is a constant. Snow, ice, cold freezing rain. The fog that veils the lake from view. And the constant clamor of the ice breaking up or coming together or moaning, just like a human might moan. This is certain to be on my list of best first novels for next year.
Reviewed by Sally A. Fellows,
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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