wjreadsbooks 's review for:

The Lake House by Sarah Beth Durst
3.0
Claire excelled at three things: ballet, homework, and identifying all the ways there were to die in any given situation.

I rarely read nature, survivalist type of books but decided to give The Lake House a shot because it's written by Sarah Beth Durst and she's always been a favorite of mine. While the plot was tense and the banter among the three girls was funny, the plot took a bit of a left-turn towards the last third of the book that I wasn't sure if I could recover from.

The Good
1. The premise

Claire is left abandoned at the Lake House with two other girls, Mariana and Reyva, whom she had only met briefly on the boat ride to the summer camp. All of their parents had been excited to send them to a summer of adventure and thrills but the Lake House is not what any of them had imagined - the house looks burnt down; there are no other fellow campers and they find a dead body in the woods. There's no way off the island, no signal on their phones and there's definitely something out that that is hunting them.

2. The girls

Despite the pretty grim premise, the girls' conversations with each other had somewhat comedic elements simply because of the juxtaposition between their situations and their behaviors around each other:
She watched the trees, looking for a hint of movement. She saw nothing. No more twigs broke. She felt her skin prickle, certain they weren't alone.

"You two sleep," Reyva said. "I'll take first watch."

She couldn't imagine being able to sleep. Her mind felt as if it were whirring as loudly as the motorboat's engines, incessantly tossing up terrible thoughts.

"What will you do if someone comes?" Mariana asked.

"No idea. Guess I'll punch their gun."

It was going to be a very long night.

Claire hoped they survived it.

Aside from the funny parts, the description of the three girls' friendship actually felt pretty organic. I could buy that over the days, they gradually reveal aspects of their personalities and personal hardships with each other.
The Bad

There's a huge left-turn that the book takes
Spoiler I didn't expect there would be a supernatural element to the story. Basically, there was no summer camp to begin with. All the girls' parents had left their fellow camper to die/become possess by an old spirit and in exchange, their kids are to take its place once the guy left behind got too old.

There's a lot of holes with this plot given that nothing supernatural had happened to the girls despite the number of days that they had spent on the island, until the very end. Given the lack of hints or foreshadowing of this, I felt like the momentum took an immediate nosedive when this was revealed.