This story follows June's return to her childhood summer home after the deaths of her mother and older sister in a short time frame. She hasn't been back since the summer she was 12 when her mother suddenly had them leave the lake house after her father left them. Now a forty year old divorced mom of twins, she finds out her mother never sold the house on Avril Island like she always said she had done and June goes back in search of answers.
I found this to be a very intriguing domestic mystery that started off pretty slowly, but had a lot of good reveals that really ramped up my interest. The lake house is on an island in Lake Champlain, Vermont. I grew up in Vermont and could immediately connect with the whole situation of out of state people coming up to their vacation homes in the summer and the tensions that can create with the locals. June's emotional journey through this story was really the highlight for me. She's grieving her mother and sister and goes to the lake house to try and process her grief and get some closure. But then finding out the truth of what happened with her father and how she had been kept completely in the dark growing up piled more emotions onto June. June returning to the lake house prompted her to examine and re-examine her memories of her summers there and now, as an adult, figuring out what was really going on with her family. When the book moved more into the mystery investigation, it would still ground the reader in June's grief which was really interesting to see how the more she uncovered the truth, the more it caused her to confront her feelings around her mother and sister. I thought the mystery was well crafted, intriguing, and integrated well into June's personal growth arc.
My favorite part of this book was the lake house. It is the only house on the island and, as such, is very remote so there's an immediate sort of eerie feeling that is contrasting with June's happy memories there. The house becomes a charter in the story as the plot develops, almost seeming to give June hints of where to look next for her answers. Not in an explicit supernatural way or anything like that, just by the very nature of being a place with a lot of history that triggers her memories. When June first arrives to the house, we get a very long and detailed description of the rooms and layout of the house. When I initially read this part, I did get a little bored because there wasn't much going on besides June walking around and noticing things like the mismatched silverware in the drawer or the quilt on the bed. These were aspects that, at that moment, didn't really mean much to the reader but as we got deeper into the story, I was glad we had that long description to really be able to picture the house and any changes that were going on. Once some spooky things start happening around the house and June learns how some of the locals feel about the house on Avril Island, it really feels like June and the house become a sort of team to protect the good times that June remembers on that island and find out the truth of what happened almost 30 years ago.
This story is told in dual POV between June and her dead sister, May. The obvious comparison is The Lovely Bones where the dead character follows the living ones as they navigate their grief and investigation. In this case, May dies in a car accident (that we get on page in chapter 1) so there's no mystery to her death. She floats in and out of the story and at the beginning is more of a third party observer to give the reader some perspective. I didn't love this choice at the beginning where I felt that the few times we got May's POV it interrupted the narrative flow of June's POV. We didn't get much of May's POV and since it was just another window to watch June through, I didn't really get the point. As the story progresses, May starts remembering things and we find out that she knew more about their father and the mystery behind his disappearance than she ever said while she was alive. These revelations did make May's chapters more engaging, but since there was no way for June to talk to May, it really felt like May was just telling the reader a bit earlier than June would find out anyway. There's also a bit of a supernatural element at play where sometimes June thinks she hears May's voice or smells her soap. But I never felt like this connection was really explored as much as I was expecting it to be. May's story did follow a very standard arc where she died, her spirit finds herself connected to June for some reason, she helps June find answers, then she is able to be free at the end. I could see what Hamilton was going for, I just didn't feel that May's character arc held the same amount of emotional tension and heaviness for me that June's did. For me, I think the story would have had a much bigger emotional impact if we were just following June and she was finding out these secrets and working through her grief of not only the physical death of her sister but also the metaphorical death of their relationship not being what she thought it was. I could see this mechanic working for readers who are maybe more spiritual than I am or who have maybe lost someone very close to them.
I really enjoyed the way June interacted with the locals and how they reacted when they found out who she is. These interactions are really fantastic, watching June interact with people who have some very strong feelings about her family and seeing her realize that the relationships she thought her family had with the town were not necessarily accurate. Some were personally involved with her family and others were just the townspeople who were around for the aftermath of June's father's disappearance. I do wish we would have gotten a bit more of that small town gossip mill going in this story and I was waiting for some sort of big party or something where everyone would get together and there would be some big reveals (like a fourth of July BBQ, for example). She also mainly runs into people who were friends with her parents but I would have liked more present day interactions with other kids June knew from back then. I think more interactions or more in depth interactions would have helped flesh out exactly how influential June's family was on the town. Or, these additional views could give us more of an insight into how June changed from a 12 year old to now and we could get her feelings on some of the ways her life didn't turn out as planned. We do get some of that when June runs into Ezra - the son of the groundskeeper - but I really wanted more.
The ending and reveals are what can make or break a mystery and I thought this book really stuck the landing. I did guess the big end reveal pretty early on, but there were still a number of reveals that I didn't see coming and I thought were pulled off well. I found all the twists to have breadcrumbs that, if you picked up on them, you could have guessed the twist but the crumbs weren't super obvious so it wasn't one of those books that really holds your hand through the reveal. I've skimmed through some other reviews and the ending seems to be a bit hit or miss where some some readers think it is asking for a bit too much of a suspension of disbelief and there were too many twists to be believable. I didn't find any of the twists to be completely unfounded and thought, overall, that the ending was pretty believable and well developed. I didn't love how the romance thread wrapped up but I found this story much more to be about June's personal journey than the romance so I wasn't too bothered. I found this a very isolated story really about June and her connection with this island so I wasn't bothered by the fact that we don't get a whole lot of information about her life before or after the events on the island. We do get a few glimpses - just enough to know that the events of the story did affect her - but we aren't diving deep into her life.
Overall, a very satisfying slow burn mystery with some very dramatic twists in the third act.
Thanks to NetGalley and Crooked Lane Books for the ARC.
Expected publication date: April 13, 2021.
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