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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.
An author is lucky to bring one character so vividly to life; the gifted McIntyre…has done it for all of his. It may seem odd praise for a writer, but it's among the highest: as you drink in this book, you barely notice the words.
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Mr Rj Clark
reviewed Lake Overturn on January 26, 2011 Lake Overturn
We have a modern literary epidemic, admit it. Symptoms include apathetic narrators, shorter novels, yawn-inducing stories of the ultra-rich, unsympathetic characters, and the same old drivel about ultra hip city life. The cure is Vestal McIntyre, taking us back to a time when penicillin cured everything and characters were substantial, interesting, and freakishly relatable. Maybe I tire of a rich girl crisis or Sex and the City escapism, but for some reason, "Lake Overturn" was a big glass of water in a room full of stale Red Bull.
As mentioned in the summary, it's small town Idaho in the 80's. The connecting thread throughout the varied character stories is the idea of actual lake overturn: a natural disaster where carbon dioxide erupts from deep lake water and poses a deadly threat to anyone living in the vicinity. Metaphorically, all of McIntyre's characters are also ready to explode. We have Gene (doing a science fair project on lake overturn), his fundamentalist single-mom Connie, his best friend Enrique, Enrique's housekeeping mother Lina, bus drivers, brothers, aspiring surrogate mother Wanda, and even more than these. McIntyre juggles every chainsaw perfectly, there is no need to make character notes in the margins. I found that there were of course characters I liked reading about more than others (Connie and Wanda were faves), but on the whole, the book is well balanced, and of course the holy grail for me: well paced.
Aside from being excellent literary fiction, "Lake Overturn" reminds me of why I love books by Anthony Trollope, "War and Peace", and the lengthy like. We have so much room to see all of characters grow in a filled-out novel; nothing is sliced and diced like a skinny Palahniuk salad. I prefer my novels to be filling and satisfying, thank you. And McIntyre is a strangely poetic writer, in spite of Idaho and the curse of describing a small town; and also an unbiased and a fantastic narrator of the different faiths, sexualities, and preferences of each character. I have to say, this book gets the big slow clap from me.
Recommended like crazy,
EZ Read Staffer Jenifer
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