Mistik Lake by Martha Brooks

On a stone-cold night in 1981 a carload of teenagers went joyriding out on
frozen Mistik Lake. The car careened around a few ice fishing shacks... then
skidded and shimmied farther out on the lake, suddenly broke through the ice,
and sank to the bottom.

Seventeen year old Odella's mother, Sally, was the lone survivor of that accident and it influenced their lives forever. Odella grows up watching her alcoholic mother drink her way through her depression and guilt regarding that night. Finally Sally leaves her husband and three kids to fend for themselves while she runs off with her boyfriend to Iceland. Odella takes refuge at the family's summer home in Mistik Lake, where she meets Jimmy, a boy who can finally bring a smile to her face and help her forget all of her family's problems.

The imagery created by Martha Brooks in Mistik Lake was breathtaking and a definite surprise from the other young adult novels I've read so far in this unit. She creates Mistik Lake in your mind making it seem quaint and somehow unique from other summer destination towns. She also writes from three different points of view Odella, Jimmy, and Odella's Aunt Gloria. All these viewpoints come together as a cohesive story while switching around in time from Gloria's youth, to the time of the accident, to the present with Odella and Jimmy's burgeoning romance.

I would say that this book is for high school kids and older. Sexuality is a running theme in Mistik Lake as Odella experiments in order to cope with her problems, and her Aunt Gloria also seems confused with her own sexuality even as a senior citizen. The more the story goes on the more that is revealed regarding Odella's mother's past. Brooks does a great job of shocking you with the revelations that keep coming in the end, but after a while it becomes a bit too much.