#292 ~ Lake Overturn

Lake Overturn by Vestal McIntyre

Published by: Harper Perennial

Published on: June 2010

Page Count: 443

Genre: Fiction

My Reading Format: Paperback review copy provided by the publisher

Available Formats: Hardcover, paperback, eBook

Eula, Idaho, is a cluster of steeples, oak trees, and boxlike homes sandwiched between golden fields and a wide-open sky. It freezes in the winter and bakes in the summer, but the air is so dry that neither extreme gets under your skin. It has never seen a battle, or an earthquake, or a Democrat in City Hall.

Still, life in Eula is anything but simple.

Lina and Connie are single mothers, neighbors in Eula’s trailer park. Lina, the daughter of migrant Mexican farm workers, is trying to cope with her angry teenage son Jesús, newly returned after living with wealthy white foster parents. Connie, long abandoned, struggles with her literal reading of Old Testament laws against remarriage, especially when a handsome missionary visits her congregation. The women’s younger sons, Enrique and Gene, are misfits whose mutual love of science offers stability and respite from schoolyard cruelties.

Determined to win the statewide science fair, Enrique and Gene devise an experiment involving “lake overturn,” a real scientific phenomenon in which deadly gases collect and eventually erupt from a lake’s depths. In their quest to discover if Eula could suffer from such an event, the boys come into contact with an odd assortment of locals, including the frail-hearted school principal with grand ambitions, a rich but lonely lawyer who finds love outside his marriage just as his wife is succumbing to cancer, and a woman tortured by a past of abuse and addiction who decides to turn things around by offering herself as a surrogate mother.

With sweeping perspective and a Victorian wealth of character, Lake Overturn exposes small-town America in all its beauty and treachery, sunshine and secrets.

Earlier this year, Jen from Devourer of Books spent a week focusing on titles from Harper Perennial.  One of the titles she featured was Lake Overturn.  This book especially caught my eye because of the gorgeous cover and the title.  It fit the Body of Water category for my What’s in a Name 3 reading challenge, but most of all, I loved the torn piece of paper floating on water.  Something about that image struck me.  After reading the novel, I still think it fits really well.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out exactly how I was going to tackle this post.  I enjoyed the book, but there is way too much that can and probably should be said about it.  As you can see in the summary, there are quite a few characters that inhabit Eula, Iowa.  None of them are insignificant.  I spoke about this with Jen and we both agreed that Lake Overturn is a novel made up of several short stories sewn together by time, place, and theme.   Enrique and Gene may seem to be the main characters at the offset.  It is their experiment – something that I found very fascinating – which provides this book its title.  However, there is way too much going on in Lake Overturn for that to be true.  They do not disappear in the middle of the story by any means, but it’s fair to say that their experiences serve as bookends for the novel.

While I liked Lake Overturn and think that McIntyre is a talented writer, the number of characters weighed me down.  Partially this is because I started reading this before finishing other books.  Reading in fits and spurts did not work well at all.  I didn’t catch traction until I started reading it exclusively.  I kept wanting to compartmentalize certain story lines – parents versus students, growing up versus falling in love, etc… but it really is impossible because of the way that the characters are related to one another.

Taken as a whole, however, it does have a lot to say about the things you do not know that are happening to the people around you.  Everyone was caught up in their own crisis virtually that it would have been very easy for them to overlook one another entirely.  It’s been quite a while since I’ve thought this much about structure in any depth.

Final Thoughts

Vestal McIntyre has written an interesting story that is more than the coming of age of two young men.  It’s about the coming of age of an entire town.  I would suggest reading this novel when you have the opportunity to fully concentrate on it.  With the number of characters, it’s easy to lose track of who is who unless reading Lake Overturn is your primary focus.

Reading Challenge Review

This review counts toward my participation in 2010′s What’s In a Name 3 Challenge hosted by Candace from Beth Fish Reads.  This book title counts toward the Body of Water category.

Other Voices

You’ve read what I have to say.  Why not check out these bloggers’ reviews?

Devourer of Books
Killin’ Time Reading