The Lake Of Dead Languages

When Jane leaves Heart Lake, the boarding school in North America where her two roommates drowned, she starts a new life with a scholarship to Vassar, thinking she will never return to the scene of the awful tragedies. But years later as a single mother, desperate for work, she finds herself back on the shores of Heart Lake, teaching Latin to girls who remind her horribly of her own youth. Carol Goodman's talent for suspense is unrivalled. This, her debut novel, is a long book - but there's not a page that lets your attention wander away from the characters' situations and how they tragically affect one another. In their loneliness away from home, the cleverer girls form an unwholesome admiration for their Latin teacher and take refuge in Roman rituals, standing on the rocks in the lake at night and re-enacting a maypole dance with all its pagan details. The mystery of the deaths of Jane's closest friends was never solved, and although reason argues that there must have been some sort of psychological impulse in unhappy adolescent girls to copy each other's desperate actions, there is also an irrational dread that the school's lake holds a supernatural pull which cannot be resisted, and that the same tragedies will play themselves out again. The idealizing of a teacher by mildly unstable teenagers, with awful results, is a theme which succeeded in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Dead Poets' Society, and it excels here, worked out in lyrical prose with sharp visual images of the beauty and savagery of the surrounding countryside. This is a story which satisfies on several levels, but perhaps the most satisfying is that Jane's personal story, past and present, her relationships and psychology are the main point of the narrative and are seen through to a convincing conclusion. (Kirkus UK)