Editorial Content for The Girl in the Lake

A paranormal researcher is drawn into an unsettling mystery when she connects with a young girl who claims to recollect the life of a long-missing teen in Lauren Oliver’s spooky thriller, THE GIRL IN THE LAKE.

Kate Willis works with the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies, one of the only serious academic centers in the U.S. dedicated to studying “extraordinary cognitive and perceptual phenomena,” including claims of reincarnation and life after death. (DOPS is a real department at UVA.) But Kate is no true believer in ghosts and spirits. She’s a skeptic who “could and would happily blow holes through any theory that carried even a whiff of the supernatural.” Most incidents she looks into can be explained away as the work of “scam artists, psychological abusers, and extraordinary environmental dysfunction.” But Kate’s newest case, which takes her back to the small Massachusetts town where she spent summers as a child, will challenge her in ways she never expected.

"The novel’s biggest strength is its main character. Kate is messy and complicated as she attempts to understand the inexplicable and come to terms with her own role in what happened to Becca."

Kate arrives in Stockbridge at the request of Emily Haskell, a desperate single mom who wants Kate to interview her six-year-old daughter, Henley, about what the girls calls “her other life.” The steady-minded Kate suspects there’s a rational explanation for Henley’s troubling memories and behavior. After all, the human mind is just a “machine --- a vast neural processor of inputs and outputs.” But it quickly becomes apparent that the child’s recollections mirror the life of Becca McGuire, Kate’s one-time best friend who vanished from the now-shuttered Camp Sauquamet at age 14. 

Kate spent decades burying her own memories of that last, traumatic summer, losing herself in both work and, for a time, alcohol to cope with the past. But after meeting Henley, she feels the past “tugging at her,” sending her down a twisty path to discover the truth about what really happened to Becca, and to find out if it’s possible that Henley could be the reincarnated version of the fiery, rebellious young teen.

Oliver’s carefully crafted novel evokes the supernatural while always keeping one foot in the real world. Like Kate, readers will find themselves chilled by Henley’s strange and hard-to-explain connection to Becca while also searching for a logical explanation for what’s happening. The story’s dual timeline shifts between an adult Kate’s efforts to discover the truth and her memories of the events that led up to Becca’s disappearance.

Oliver has written multiple books for young adults. She draws on that background in THE GIRL IN THE LAKE as she skillfully evokes the chaos and confusion that comes with the transition from childhood to adolescence. Becca and Kate were part of a close-knit foursome of camp friends, and the changing, sometimes fraught dynamics of those relationships played a role in Becca’s disappearance, as did the quintessentially teen girl fascination with the local legend of “The Gray Lady.” Like many teen girls before her, the precocious Becca, who came from an unstable home, was “a tyrant --- beautiful, and terrible, and unpredictable.” But she also could be kind and fiercely loyal. For all her flaws, her ultimate fate is one she didn’t deserve.

The novel’s biggest strength is its main character. Kate is messy and complicated as she attempts to understand the inexplicable and come to terms with her own role in what happened to Becca. Though it is sometimes painful, she’s willing to test herself and her beliefs in order to get to the truth. THE GIRL IN THE LAKE is the first in a planned series (the book ends with an enticing teaser for Kate’s upcoming case), and readers will want to return to see what kind of mysteries she investigates next.