Lake Overturn
By Vestal McIntyre
(Harper Perennial, Paperback, 9780061671265, 448pp.)
Publication Date: July 2010
Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook, Hardcover
Categories: General
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A Washington Post Best Book of the year
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
Eula, Idaho, has never seen a battle, an earthquake, or a Democrat in City Hall. Yet life here is anything but simple.
Lina's angry son JesÚs has recently returned to the trailer park after living with wealthy white foster parents. Her younger son Enrique and his best friend, Gene—who lives in a neighboring trailer with his very Christian mother, Connie—are misfits who cling to their studies in the face of schoolyard cruelties. Determined to win the statewide science fair, Enrique and Gene devise an experiment involving "lake overturn," a phenomenon in which deadly gases erupt from a lake's depths. In their endeavor to discover if Eula could suffer from such an event, the boys come into contact with an odd assortment of locals—including a frail-hearted school principal with grand ambitions, a lonely lawyer who finds new love as his wife is dying, and a woman who decides to escape a life of exploitation and addiction by becoming a surrogate mother.
With sweeping perspective and a Victorian wealth of character, Lake Overturn exposes small-town America in all its beauty and treachery, sunshine and secrets.
Vestal McIntyre's story collection, You Are Not the One, won a Lambda Literary Award and earned him fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
“What a great relief [it is] to read Vestal McIntyre’s splendid first novel. . . . Lake Overturn is loving and searing and sad and, above all, a pleasure to read.”
-Adam Haslett, author of You Are Not a Stranger Here
“Every character in [Lake Overturn] is so real, complex, and interesting, the scope of the novel at once so wide and so deep, the themes and ideas so thoroughly embodied by the story, I felt as if I were reading a modern-day Middlemarch.”
-Kate Christensen, PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author of The Great Man
“Lake Overturn is a lovingly rendered portrait of small-town America. Vestal McIntyre knows his people intimately—how they speak, their manners and customs; but, most importantly, he knows their troubled hearts, and he plumbs the depths of those hearts with remarkable empathy and wisdom.”
-Ron Rash, author of Serena
“[A] deliriously colorful and deliciously engrossing tapestry of a small-town’s depressing poverty, pointless pettiness, quirky rivalries, domestic infidelities, desperate drug use, onerous class and race divisions – and occasional quiet, sentimental triumphs.”
-Q Syndicate
“Richly imagined and fully realized, Overturn has given us what we didn’t know we were waiting for: the next Great Idahoan Novel.”
-Out Magazine
“[Keeps] us engrossed from the beginning. . . . He illuminates with humor and sympathy the mundane lives of a group of vivid characters.”
-Library Journal
“This astonishing novel — a great big captivating, multi-character drama set in Eula, Idaho — has McIntyre juggling a half-dozen intersecting plots and people with extraordinary grace.”
-Philadelphia Gay News
“Striking. . . . An author is lucky to bring one character so vividly to life: the gifted McIntyre...has done it for all of his. It may seem odd praise for a writer, but it’s among the highest: as you drink in this book, you barely notice the words.”
-New York Times Book Review
“Reading Vestal McIntyre’s deliriously ambrosial novel is like entering reader’s heaven. Constantly surprising. . . . I loved it.”
-Peter Cameron, award-winning author of The City of Your Final Destination
“A vast, intricate lattice of relationships, reminiscent of the novels of Richard Russo. . . . McIntyre is an honest enough artist that he [is] . . . capable of handling even the most noxious elements when he stirs his American backwater.”
-Washington Post
“[A] nicely handled exploration of the world’s effect on the tightly woven life of a small town driven by faith.”
-Denver Post
A Best Book of 2009
-Washington Post Book World
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