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A review by bea_reads_books
The Lake by Natasha Preston
Did not finish book. Stopped at 26%.
Okay I’m going to be vague at first and put full spoilers towards the end, so just a heads up.
This book focuses on Esme, a counselor in training returning to the summer camp of her childhood with her best friend. The problem? They have a secret about what happened the last time they were at camp, and it seems like the secret is trying to come out.
Sounds promising right? Well, in my opinion, wrong. You may have noticed that I only got 26% of the way into this book before DNF’ing, and that is because their “big secret” is absolutely ridiculous. She spends the first 20 ish percent of the book referencing that night, and it got old so fast. Especially after you find out what the secret is and Esme CONTINUES to say “that night” in her head as if the reader doesn’t know what she means. The book wants you to think this is a big deal and very tense and scary, but I just could not make myself care. It was genuinely the dumbest “bad thing happened in my past that no one can know about” backstory I’ve ever come across in a book.
I’ll be honest though, the main reason I DNF’d wasn’t even because of the plot/structural issues. It was more that:
a) this woman writes dialog like she’s never heard two people speak to each other before
b) a lot of the characters are either teens or 7-8 years old, and it’s very clear she has no idea how kids of either of those ages act, and
c) the narrative is weirdly misogynistic towards a literal eight year old child, just because she brought a hair straightener to camp and isn’t a huge fan of the outdoors. The main character Esme and her head counselor spend a lot of time rolling their eyes at each other when this (again, EIGHT YEAR OLD) child says something snippy about wanting to get away from the heat or the bugs, two things which Esme also incessantly complains about. They make fun of her shoes and clothes and talk about her as if she’s a popular kid bully. AGAIN I REMIND YOU THIS CHILD IS EIGHT. It got so irritating I just could not keep reading.
Okay, time for spoilers:
The “big secret” Esme is carrying around? When she and her best friend were seven and were campers at this camp, they snuck out to follow some older kids into the woods one night. They lit a fire and accidentally burned down a few trees. That’s literally it.
Oh, and there was another girl there who supposedly ran away from home and wanted to show them a deer she killed while she was out in the woods, and they freaked and got in some kind of fight? Idk it was just super weird, and the book tried to make you think the stakes are really high and this is super serious, but it’s just… a few burned trees. Like I genuinely do not understand why Esme was so nervous to come back to camp, like she would be found out after ten years.
Anyway, I looked up spoilers because 25% of the way into the book I literally predicted the entire rest of the plot and wanted to see if I was right and it was actually that badly written. I was. As soon as I heard about the other girl in the woods, I knew she was the culprit and wanted revenge on Esme and her friend for leaving her out in the woods that night. Which is exactly what happens.
I am also very annoyed because I just finished “The Haunting” by this same author, and I was enjoying it right up until the end. It was supposed to be a cliffhanger, but in actuality it read like she just didn’t feel like finishing the book. It wasn’t well done. But the story itself was atmospheric, and I have a weakness for that. So I thought, hey why not read another of her books and see if I like it any better. Except this one was so much worse, all the issues I had with The Haunting were magnified by ten (clunky dialog, juvenile prose, weird pointless side plots) and the atmospheric writing from The Haunting didn’t even carry over into The Lake to make it enjoyable. Then I found out from my google search that the end of this book is just like the ending of The Haunting (stupid, pointless, and infuriating) and I was officially done.
So yeah. If you were allowed to rate DNF’s on this app, I would give this book two stars.
This book focuses on Esme, a counselor in training returning to the summer camp of her childhood with her best friend. The problem? They have a secret about what happened the last time they were at camp, and it seems like the secret is trying to come out.
Sounds promising right? Well, in my opinion, wrong. You may have noticed that I only got 26% of the way into this book before DNF’ing, and that is because their “big secret” is absolutely ridiculous. She spends the first 20 ish percent of the book referencing that night, and it got old so fast. Especially after you find out what the secret is and Esme CONTINUES to say “that night” in her head as if the reader doesn’t know what she means. The book wants you to think this is a big deal and very tense and scary, but I just could not make myself care. It was genuinely the dumbest “bad thing happened in my past that no one can know about” backstory I’ve ever come across in a book.
I’ll be honest though, the main reason I DNF’d wasn’t even because of the plot/structural issues. It was more that:
a) this woman writes dialog like she’s never heard two people speak to each other before
b) a lot of the characters are either teens or 7-8 years old, and it’s very clear she has no idea how kids of either of those ages act, and
c) the narrative is weirdly misogynistic towards a literal eight year old child, just because she brought a hair straightener to camp and isn’t a huge fan of the outdoors. The main character Esme and her head counselor spend a lot of time rolling their eyes at each other when this (again, EIGHT YEAR OLD) child says something snippy about wanting to get away from the heat or the bugs, two things which Esme also incessantly complains about. They make fun of her shoes and clothes and talk about her as if she’s a popular kid bully. AGAIN I REMIND YOU THIS CHILD IS EIGHT. It got so irritating I just could not keep reading.
Okay, time for spoilers:
Oh, and there was another girl there who supposedly ran away from home and wanted to show them a deer she killed while she was out in the woods, and they freaked and got in some kind of fight? Idk it was just super weird, and the book tried to make you think the stakes are really high and this is super serious, but it’s just… a few burned trees. Like I genuinely do not understand why Esme was so nervous to come back to camp, like she would be found out after ten years.
Anyway, I looked up spoilers because 25% of the way into the book I literally predicted the entire rest of the plot and wanted to see if I was right and it was actually that badly written. I was. As soon as I heard about the other girl in the woods, I knew she was the culprit and wanted revenge on Esme and her friend for leaving her out in the woods that night. Which is exactly what happens.
I am also very annoyed because I just finished “The Haunting” by this same author, and I was enjoying it right up until the end. It was supposed to be a cliffhanger, but in actuality it read like she just didn’t feel like finishing the book. It wasn’t well done. But the story itself was atmospheric, and I have a weakness for that. So I thought, hey why not read another of her books and see if I like it any better. Except this one was so much worse, all the issues I had with The Haunting were magnified by ten (clunky dialog, juvenile prose, weird pointless side plots) and the atmospheric writing from The Haunting didn’t even carry over into The Lake to make it enjoyable. Then I found out from my google search that the end of this book is just like the ending of The Haunting (stupid, pointless, and infuriating) and I was officially done.
So yeah. If you were allowed to rate DNF’s on this app, I would give this book two stars.