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    Lake Overturn: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Lake Overturn: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Lake Overturn: A Novel
    Ebook578 pages9 hours

    Lake Overturn: A Novel

    By Vestal McIntyre

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this 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.

    Editor's Note

    Engrossing & humane…

    McIntyre’s often hilarious and always generous voice brings a small town in Idaho to life in this magnificent debut novel about infidelity, drug addiction, and deadly lake gas.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJul 13, 2010
    ISBN9780062028495
    Unavailable
    Lake Overturn: A Novel
    Author

    Vestal McIntyre

    Vestal McIntyre's story collection, You Are Not the One, won a Lambda Literary Award and earned him fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

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    Reviews for Lake Overturn

    4/5

    48 ratings7 reviews

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    • 3/5
      q
    • 5/5
      good
    • 5/5
      math
    • 4/5
      I am very unclear as to how I feel about this book. It takes place in the 1980s, set in a small town in Idaho, the plot covers multiple characters and their interactions, direct and indirect. There are a lot of Issues here. Everyone has a big Issue looming over them - the kid who is figuring out his sexuality, the man having an affair, the girl whose mother is terminally ill, the woman readjusting to having her teenage son return from foster care ... everyone is a Lifetime movie. And a big part of me couldn't stop thinking REALLY? REALLY, everyone in this town is having a movie-of-the-week issue at the same time? On the other hand, the writing was quite solid. There wasn't a word or a phrase that struck the wrong tone in the entire thing, just about. It was consistent, believable, and created a clarity of description that was impressive. I'm still pondering the choice of the time period. Grade: I'm going to go with a very dependable B.Recommended: Well, I think the subject matter could be annoying, so I would consider the Afterschool Specialness of it carefully before picking it up. It's not bad, but not outstanding, in the "Little Town, Big Secrets" genre.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This is one book that is sorely missing from many best of 2009 lists. Personally, I enjoyed this one more than the other books I read this year that found themselves on those lists.

      Great characters with wonderful development abound. McIntyre handles his young characters with an expertise often lacking in fiction concerning adolescents. This novel has an interesting plot which kept my attention throughout, even when the issues were juvenile.

      A fabulous read. I definitely look forward to McIntyre's next novel.
    • 4/5
      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 ThoughtsVestal 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.
    • 5/5
      Lake Overturn by Vestal McIntyre is one of the best books I have read in a very long while. It is a rare author who can introduce us to a cast of enchanting characters, while creating an intriguing story has well. McIntyre has succeeded on both counts.Set in a typical Small Town, USA (Eula, Idaho), the reader is introduced to myriad personalities, each of whom the author gently breaths life into until you feel like you've known them your whole life. The story itself evokes themes of striving for excellence, as well as being mired in mediocrity. There are triumphs and failures. There are half truths and overwhelming dishonesty. We are brought along for the incredible ride as the characters search for their own personal joy.McIntyre's writing style is evocative of Jeffrey Eugenides and Julia Glass. Hopefully he will be lauded as such or, at the very least, continue writing so we can enjoy his artistry.