How a Woman Becomes a Lake by Marjorie Celona. Advance Reader Copy (eARC) from the publisher via Netgalley included. No affiliate links used. You can read my full disclosure policy here.
It’s 1986 and Vera takes her dog for a walk on New Year’s Day in the local woods, like she always does. This time she never returns home. Before her disappearance she makes a phone call to the police telling them that she has found a young boy wandering in the woods by the lake. By the time the police arrive, both Vera and the boy are gone. Vera’s car, however, and her dog remain.
Leo takes his two sons—Jesse and Dimitri— out to the woods, so they can write their New Year’s resolutions on paper boats and push them onto the frozen lake. But things don’t quite go to plan.
Lewis pulls into the parking lot of Squire Point expecting to be greeted by Vera and the boy she found. Instead he finds an abandoned car and a dog left alone. What has happened to Vera and the boy?
Vera and her husband argued the night before her disappearance, so naturally the police think he is involved. But when they discover that Vera made a phone call to a woman named Evelina from the same pay phone she called the police, focus shifts away from Vera’s husband, Denny.
Told from multiple points of view, How a Woman Becomes a Lake* is a spellbinding novel about familial bonds, making mistakes, secrets and whether or not new beginnings can undo the damage of the past.
How a Woman Becomes a Lake by Marjorie Celona is published by Virgao and is available in paperback, ebook and audio format.
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