If you’re seventeen or, if you ever were seventeen, this book was written for you. I believe you can read A House at the Bottom of a Lake purely for the enjoyment of the story or as an allegory representing the sometimes-frightening passage of teenagers into adulthood. Either way, it’s well done.

In this novel, two teenagers take a canoe out onto a lake, then to a second lake, and finally, to a third, previously unknown lake. To get there, they take chances, scraping the sides of the pristine canoe, as they must lay down and push through a narrow tunnel to get to this third lake where they find the house, under the water. Their obsession with the house and each other grows with each visit until they go too far. What is too far? What happens when you go too far? Well, that’s the story.

There were moments in the beginning when my belief was almost stretched to the breaking point, then the uneasy feeling of dread and escalating tension pulled me back in, and the story never lost me–after that, in fact, I couldn’t put it down.

A House at the Bottom of a Lake will be published on 19 January 2021.

Thanks to Random House Publishing – Ballantine Del Rey, #NetGalley, and the author of #AHouseattheBottomofaLake for the ARC in exchange for my honest feedback, this is it!