Hi friends, happy Wednesday! I hope you’re all having a good week so far. The fact that it’s a short week is not making it feel any shorter! Today I’m posting my review of Carley Fortune’s novel Meet Me at the Lake.

This novel was short-listed for Canada Reads 2024.

Meet Me at the Lake by: Carley Fortune: After the death of her mother, Fern Brookbanks finds herself back home at the Brookbanks Resort in cottage country, a place she’s been trying to desperately leave since she was a teen. The resort is hers now and she’s faced with the dilemma of either selling the place or running it herself. To top things off, Will, a man from her past, shows up to help consult for the resort. Fern and Will spent one day together and haven’t spoken in ten years, after he never showed up to meet her at the resort. Now, they must work together, but will it be a good thing or a bad thing. This novel was heavily emotional and really took the reader on roller-coaster. It was so easy to fall into the story and into the world that Fortune created. The plot was told in a back and forth dual timeline, past and present and that worked well. We got to see the two main characters when they met, and now ten years later and how much had changed in their lives. This reader thought the author did an excellent job of showing how things can change as you get older, like your perception of life. When you have so much life in front of you it’s easy to say you’ll never do x, y or z, but as you get older and more life experience, things can change, and I think this book did that well. The romance of it all, this reader can see why other people didn’t like it, it’s very insta-love, seeing as the two main characters met for one day, and it completely changed them, but this didn’t feel completely unbelievable. The way the connection was written between these two felt real and raw. The fact that they still had these strong feelings ten years later was a bit of a stretch, but it didn’t deter this reader from eating it up and enjoying it. The way this almost ended did though. They weren’t a fan of the way our main character, Will, was willing to throw away everything, and it didn’t feel right that our other main character, Fern, was left to put everything back together; it really shouldn’t have been her, but the reader could see both sides and see all the flaws, which again, felt very true to real life. The end also started to fall into trop-y territory and felt a little clichéd, which almost had the reader knocking this down a star, but all the emotional stuff – not just with Fern and Will, but with Fern and her mother was what really hit home. This reader is not one to get emotionally upset by a book, but boy did this destroy them. The way Fortune wrote such a complex mother/daughter relationship was so captivating and so relatable, it hurt. The little diary entries added in were great for the storytelling, and it was an extremely effective way for us to get to know Fern’s mom without having to meet her. We obviously know her through Fern, but seeing her through the diaries gave us a glimpse of the woman she was without and before Fern. Even Fortune’s mother/son complex was well written, not as deeply, but it still held a lot of emotional ground. In the end, this wrecked this reader, but in a good way and in ways they weren’t expecting. This wasn’t the fluffy cute romance the reader thought they were getting, but more of an honest and moving coming of age story.