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GIVE ME THE COLD, HARD FACTS
Book: Daughters of the Lake
Author: Wendy Webb
WOULD YOU RECOMMEND THIS BOOK?
Probably not, unless you’ve got nothing else to do on a cold, dark October night.
TELL ME ABOUT IT ALREADY!
When I decided to read spooky books for October, I already had the hauntingly beautiful cover art of Wendy Webb’s Daughters of the Lake in mind. Billed as a Gothic masterpiece with elements of historical fiction and the supernatural, Daughters tells the story of a family with a unique past, interesting local legends and a century old murder.
“It was finally time for the lake to give her up” reads the first sentence of this book. Effortless and evocative, I was disappointed to find that most of the rest of this novel lacked the nuance of the opener. At times, Webb seemed overly descriptive yet repetitive with her descriptors to the point that I had to consider that it must be some sort of literary device. Silky, velvety, silky, velvety, silky, velvety… you get the picture. However, even a broken clock is right twice a day, and there were a few lines so eerie I get goose bumps just thinking about them.
Genuinely, I feel that the *idea* of the story was amazing. The living lake felt like something Neil Gaiman would dream up, and the living portrait almost brought the book into magical realism territory. The murder plot, while occasionally predictable, was woven seamlessly through the multiple point-of-view chapters. Remarkably, the creep factor was high throughout the narrative without ever stooping to gore.
Ultimately, hollow characters populated the pages of this tale, hindering the “slow burn” nature of the story and preventing it from really taking root in my imagination. All of this, combined with a foreseeable twist, made Daughters of the Lake a quick, but forgettable read.
Still interested? Buy it here.
