Fjords Reviews

HOME | BOOK REVIEWS | Enchantment Lake by Margi Preus
Enchantment Lake by Margi Preus

 

 

Fjords Review, ENCHANTMENT LAKE: A NORTHWOODS MYSTERY

YOUNG ADULT FICTION
ENCHANTMENT LAKE: A NORTHWOODS MYSTERY
BY MARGI PREUS

University of Minnesota Press, 2015
200 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8166-8302-4

 

by Carol Dowd-Forte

 

Francie Frye’s not really a detective, but she played one on TV.
So when the body count rises on Enchantment Lake, an enigmatic phone call from her great-aunts—made even more cryptic by bad cell reception and a woman’s tendency towards the wacky—propels seventeen year-old Francesca (aka Francie or Frenchy) out of a Manhattan theatre audition and into the woods of northern Minnesota. Locals in the town of Walpurgis (population 2,020, and dropping) are succumbing to deaths of both the natural and accidental ilk at an alarming rate, and Francie’s aunts are sure they’ll be next. Since Francie once solved mysteries on a kids’ television show, aunts Astrid and Jeannette believe their niece is the person to deduce what’s happening to long-time residents on the island, where the ersatz sleuth spent many a childhood summer.

The fact that Francie isn’t really a New York detective, but everyone she encounters believes her to be, is a running gag throughout the book. Her aunts’ eccentricities notwithstanding, Francie’s return and subsequent inquiries uncover opaque connections between the deaths and seemingly unrelated events in the otherwise tranquil enclave.

This is the first mystery from New York Times-best-selling author Margi Preus and, aside from genre, its contemporary setting is a departure for the author, whose previous works of historical fiction and nonfiction for young people include West of the Moon and the Newbery Honor-winning Heart of a Samurai. Preus lives in Minnesota, and her love of its northwoods region is evident in the definite sense of place she creates in scene and mood. This is where her narrative voice is at its strongest. The story is Francie-centric and moves along at an economical pace, with likeable secondary characters waiting to be explored further, moderate tension and suspense, and multiple storylines (some resolved, some not - perfect for the first book of what’s sure to be a series).

Francie is an easy protagonist to hang with. You’ll want to investigate her life further, which is a good thing because there’s a lot going on here. Disbelief does need to be suspended, considering the protagonist is a seventeen year-old with vaguely-referenced means of support who lives with three other girls in a New York apartment and can take off to Minnesota at a phone call’s notice, dodging her presumptive benefactor grandfather’s questions in the process. The writing is engaging, the prose lyrical at times, with spunky dialogue and enough backstory to keep readers interested, but there are several clichés (i.e. a racing pulse and a box that holds her heart) and tropes (Francie has a natural grey streak in her hair a la Harry Potter’s scar, and a hunky, god-like love interest named Nels). Overall, the voice is rather inconsistent, vacillating between too old for Francie’s years and too young for her words.

Billed as a YA read, the overall tenor of Enchantment Lake feels much more like a middle grade work, with short chapters (32 of them), limited backstory, clever wordplay (fwapped, tripptropped), and actions by the protagonist older readers would question, but younger readers may not consider dubious; which, when you think about it, would mirror the unpredictability of a hormonally-challenged teen, if crafted on purpose. At one point, after some overt grilling of a tippling suspect, at a cocktail party hosted by the island’s resident faded Broadway star, Francie leaves with the possible perp and goes out on the lake with him, at night, in a boat, alone…leaving both her cellphone and common sense elsewhere.

Clues to the villain’s identity are veiled enough to conceal the whodunit, and though the ending ties up the frayed bits of the main mystery nicely, enough detritus remains of Francie’s unanswered personal questions to demand a sequel: What really happened to Francie’s parents? Did she imagine the silver box at the Fredrickson’s? Will Francie stay in Walpurgis? Is love interest, Nels, too good to be true? And, perhaps most intriguing, how can someone who grew up summering in Minnesota and now lives in New York not know what a Dairy Queen is?

Archives

Hush by Nikki Ummel

Alexis Rhone Fancher’s Erotic: New and Selected Poems

Chasing Homer by László Krasznahorkai

Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson

dx

The Death of Sitting Bear by N. Scott Momaday

WHILE YOU WERE GONE BY SYBIL BAKER

MY STUNT DOUBLE BY TRAVIS DENTON

Made by Mary by Laura Catherine Brown

THE RAVENMASTER: My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London

Children of the New World By Alexander Weinstein

Canons by Consensus by Joseph Csicsila

And Then by Donald Breckenridge

Dear Everyone by Matt Shears

Magic City Gospel by Ashley M. Jones

Intimacy by Stanley Crawford

Lunch Poems by Deborah Kuan

The Best American Poetry 2016

Crosstalk by Connie Willis

The King of White Collar Boxing by David Lawrence

They Were Coming for Him by Berta Vias-Mahou

Verse for the Averse: a Review of Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry

That Other Me by Maha Gargash

Simone by Eduardo Lalo

Swimming by Karl Luntt

Ghost/ Landscape by Kristina Marie Darling and John Gallaher

Enchantment Lake by Margi Preus

Bad Light by Carlos Castán

Diaboliques by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly

Staying Alive by Laura Sims

Core of the Sun by Johanna Sinisalo

Fireflies by John Leland

Maze of Blood by Marly Youmans

Tender the Maker by Christina Hutchkins

Little Anodynes by Jon Pineda

Conjuror by Holly Sullivan McClure

Someone's Trying To Find You by Marc Augé

The Four Corners of Palermo by Giuseppe Di Piazza

Now You Have Many Legs to Stand On by Ashley-Elizabeth Best

The Darling by Lorraine M. López

How To Be Drawn by Terrance Hayes

Watershed Days: Adventures (A Little Thorny and Familiar) in the Home Range by Thorpe Moeckel

[INSERT] BOY by Danez Smith

Demigods on Speedway by Aurelie Sheehan

Find Me by Laura Van Den Berg

Singing Bones by Kate Schmitt

Knuckleball by Tom Pitts

Wandering Time by Luis Alberto Urrea

Teaching a Man to Unstick His Tail by Ralph Hamilton

Domenica Martinello: The Abject in the Interzones

Control Bird Alt Delete by Alexandria Peary

Twelve Clocks by Julie Sophia Paegle

Love You To a Pulp by C.S. DeWildt

Even Though I Don’t Miss You by Chelsea Martin

Women by Chloe Caldwell

Fifteen Dogs by Andre Alexis

ESSAY 2:12 A.M. by Kat Meads

Revising The Storm by Geffrey Davis

Quality Snacks by Andy Mozina

Midnight in Siberia by David Greene

Strings Attached by Diane Decillis

Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging by Joshua Dolezal

The New Testament by Jericho Brown

You Don't Know Me by James Nolan

Phoning Home: Essays by Jacob M. Appel

Words We Might One Day Say by Holly Karapetkova

Murder by Danielle Collobert

Sorrow by Catherine Gammon

The Americans by David Roderick

Put Your Hands In by Chris Hosea

I Think I Am in Friends-Love With You by Yumi Sakugawa

Third Wife by Jiri Klobouk

box of blue horses by Lisa Graley

American Neolithic by Terence Hawkins

Review of Hilary Plum’s They Dragged Them Through the Streets

The Sleep of Reason by Morri Creech

The Hush before the Animals Attack by Carol Matos

Regina Derieva, In Memoriam by Frederick Smock

Review of The House Began to Pitch by Kelly Whiddon

Hill William by Scott McClanahan

Seamus Heaney Aloft

The Bounteous World by Frederick Smock

Review of The Tide King by Jen Michalski

Going Down by Chris Campanioni

Review of Empire in the Shade of a Grass Blade by Rob Cook

Review of The Day Judge Spencer Learned the Power of Metaphor

Review of The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish

Review of Life Cycle Poems by Dena Rash Guzman

Review of Saint X by Kirk Nesset

Review of Jessica Treadway's Please Come Back to Me

Eve Asks by Christine Redman-Waldeyer