I could not stop reading this book! It kept me up well into the night and brought tears to my eyes (both sad and happy). It wasn’t what I expected to read having seen Carley Fortune’s book in bookstores and hearing about it on Canada Reads and in my online writers’ group. Meet Me at the Lake is not your typical boy meets girl and they live happily ever after romance novel.
Although I sometimes enjoy a fun, romantic read for entertainment purposes, this book was so much more than that. And here is where the line between genre and literary blurs. A book that is commercially successful, is clearly labelled as a specific genre, entertains, has an intriguing plot line, and is accessible to readers can also be well-written, character driven, involve introspection, have deeper themes, and focus on the human condition.
Meet Me at the Lake incorporates mystery, suspense, and drama into its pages as the reader pieces together the puzzle of why Will broke his promise to meet Fern at the lake one year after their original meeting, what past trauma caused Fern to want to escape her life by hiding out in Toronto, and how Will’s sudden reappearance in her life nine years too late will affect their future. Teen angst, life’s dreams, responsibility, relationships, parental difficulties, depression, anxiety, grief and loss, all play their role in Fern and Will’s story. The underlying premise is that one person, one day, one chance meeting, can change your life. And the question it raises about human experience is: Why is it so difficult for us to allow ourselves to simply be happy?
Told from Fern’s point of view, the story alternates between the present and the past, with snippets of her mom’s voice through diary entries. Carley Fortune describes Will, as well the other important people in Fern’s life (Peter, Jamie, Whitney) through Fern’s eyes, while sometimes offering a glimpse of what others see. It’s a clever literary device, one that makes Fern an enigma to the reader, restricting access to how Fern’s friends and family see her.
The beautiful setting of Canadian cottage country contrasted by the large metropolis of Toronto is vivid without overt description. We see both through Fern’s lens, and her view changes as the book progresses. Toronto offers an “invisibility cloak” and makes her “a perfect nobody” with “not a single person looking at me”. Fern is a lost soul looking for her place in the world. Before she can find herself, she must experience the trauma of losing everyone dear to her and then allowing them back into her heart. Fern’s journey of self-discovery and how it intertwines with Will’s own battles is what takes this beyond a romance novel. My final verdict: romance meets literary with five stars.
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