Ladies of the Lake. Cathy Gohlke. 2023. [July] 384 pages. [Source: Review copy]
First sentence: It had been easy to set aside the engraved invitation to the July graduation fro Lakeside Ladies Academy, less easy to ignore persistent letters from my beloved Bernadette with her daughterly pleas to attend the "most important event" of her life. Still, I never expected a call from the United States when Portia summoned me to the phone in the downstairs hallway.
Premise/plot: Rosaline Murray, our heroine, has a tough decision to make: attend her daughter's graduation ceremony and face the demons of her past OR disappoint her daughter and perhaps damage their relationship forever.
The novel is set in two timelines (for the most part) and has multiple narrators. The "past" is circa 1905 to 1917. Adelaide Rose MacNeill, an orphan from Prince Edward Island, is sent to a boarding school in Connecticut where she befriends three others--Ruth, Susannah, and Dorothy. The four become the "Ladies of the Lake" and vow to be lifelong friends who meet every several years in the gazebo at Lakeside Ladies Academy. The "present" is 1935 (and an epilogue set during the Second World War, 1943???). The narrators are Dorothy and Addie/Rosaline.
Friendships are front and center in this historical novel.
One of the BIG, BIG, BIG events in this historical novel is the Halifax Explosion of December 1917. This was a real event that had a big impact (literally and figuratively) on our main character.
My thoughts: I really LOVED this one so much. If the novel has a flaw, then perhaps it is the complete and total lack of chapters. (To be fair, perhaps this is just in the Advanced Readers Copy I previewed.) One pro to that being is that I read for LONG periods of time. If I could have managed it physically to read in one sitting, then I would have. I read it in about three or four sittings. I always wanted to read more, more, more.
I enjoyed the story, the time period, the dual narration, the suspense, the characterization.
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