Preacher's Lake

In her second novel, Lisa Vice takes us to Preacher's Lake, a small town in Maine. What I like the best about Ms. Vice's writing is her ability to make each scene resemble a photo album. She gently weaves the stories of individuals around the connections between the characters, while taking us back and forth between their lives quickly and easily. About the time I am hooked into one person or family, she jumps to another concurrent story. This works well for Ms. Vice because she never leaves us anywhere long enough to forget about the other characters. I took my time reading this book because the characters became so alive to me, I didn't want the story to end. According to her bio, Ms. Vice lived in Maine working with disadvantaged people at one time. The quirky characters make it obvious that Ms. Vice has personal knowledge about that part of the country. I enjoyed getting to know each person, and laughed and cried with them as their fortunes changed for the better, and sometimes for the worse. Ms. Vice is an up and coming writer with a great deal of talent, and I will be waiting eagerly for her next novel.

Sometimes a novel has such a dramatic, suspenseful plot that you want to race through it to the end. But reading Preacher's Lake, I found myself taking my time, savoring the delicious descriptions of place and character, losing myself to the vivid fictional world Ms. Vice has so lovingly crafted. I didn't want to race to the end because I didn't want this book to end! I felt as if I had become a part of the lives of these characters - Slim, Janesta, Crystal, Rita - witnessing their quirks, their fears, their struggle to find love, forgiveness, and meaning. Indeed, the characters are so finely drawn that they may very well become as much a part of the fabric of your memory as the real people in your life.

When I began reading Preacher's Lake, I realized I was going to have to stop everything else in my life so that I would have time to sit and read this wonderful book. Within the first few pages, I was totally caught up in the lives of the beautifully drawn characters. I quickly became involved in the stories of the gawky, childlike Slim who runs the town dump and Carol, the artist from New York who is grieving over the senseless death of her lover Annie. I watched as the seemingly disparate lives of these and other people became interwoven, falling into place like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Preacher's Lake is my vote for the best read of 1998.

I knew I was in the hands of a gifted writer when I read Lisa Vice's first novel, Reckless Driver, but with Preacher's Lake she has really outdone herself. The cast of characters ranges from Slim, a truly innocent man who keeps the landfill in a coastal town in rural Maine and learns to love what others leave behind, to Vivian, one of the funniest yet most sympathetic lesbians ever to appear in a novel. The fifteen or so major characters in the story are true to life and utterly engaging. The plot is compelling and one of the delights of the book, as in Maupin's Tales of the City, is when the paths of the characters cross and intertwine. And Lisa Vice is a powerful stylist, too. On every page there are sentences that will take your breath away. Preacher's Lake is a book you should not miss!