If you read, you'll like Lake Overturn by Vestal McIntyre. This is a unique and compelling story set in a small town in Idaho but really about Anytown, USA. Two young boys read of a natural disaster, called Lake Overturn, that happened in 1986 in Cameroon, West Africa. One of the boys, Enrique, decides to base his upcoming science project on the phenomenon. He asks his friend to be his partner but the friend proves to be more of a project than the model they build.
Enrique, his mother and brother live in a trailer park. Enrique's Mom, Lina, cleans houses on the other side of town. When her client's husband, Chuck, comes on to her, the two begin to fall in love. Lina's guilt over the affair leads her to confess to both her priest and her son. The situation is made more complicated when Enrique's father makes an unplanned visit and Chuck’s wife turns out to be fatally ill.
While Lina dusts and debates whether to follow her heart, across town, Wanda, a down on her luck recovering-ish drug addict, tries to pull her life together. She decides she will never find the perfect man so she looks to surrogacy to fill the void. She meets a needy couple, says all the right (lies) things and gets pregnant. As Wanda's story unfolds she falters and recovers over and over. Ultimately whether she can change her life lies in one moment of decision making. Vestal's story telling is at it's best with Wanda. One moment you are rooting for her, the next you hope she’s hit by a bus.
While Lina cleans house and Wanda tries to get clean, Connie, Lina's neighbor in the trailer park and a religious zealot with an unrequited libido, latches on to a traveling missionary. Connie's son, Gene, is Enrique's somewhat autistic science partner, and as Connie tries to follow God's path (which of course includes judging everyone else along the way) she ignores her son’s needs to the point the reader is left shaking their head wondering how much religion is too much.
As these characters make their way through what amounts to daily life, we feel we are in the room, in their heads, with them as they make decisions good and bad. We feel their pain, we see the road ahead, and when the book is done and all the lose ends come together, it's one of those books where you wish there were more just so we could hang in Eula, Idaho a little longer.
If you enjoy fantastic storytelling, beautifully written descriptions and complex, realistic characters this novel is for you. Check it out!
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