Go Home Lake
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
In the late 1960s Penny is the youngest of four kids, known on her street as the girl with the mean brothers. She spends all year looking forward to her summers spent at Go Home Lake, where she passes the days in a soaked bathing suit, catching frogs, and getting her daily fill of fresh air.
Yet Penny's summers are far from pleasant. Her father’s weekend visits to the cottage are sporadic, and her brothers prey on her innocence in every way, while her mother offers little sympathy. But Penny holds onto a secret ambition – she’s going to be a real cowboy. If only her dad would buy her that pony he’s been promising each year.
Told from the perspective of Penny looking back on those pivotal summers, Go Home Lake tells the story of a seemingly "normal" family. Megs Beach deftly balances a child's naiveté with razor-sharp observations of a 1960s middle-class family and of a childhood that only felt wrong years later.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Beach's middling debut novel is narrated by Penny, the youngest of four siblings, whose story begins when she is a preschooler in 1967. Each year, the family leaves Toronto to spend summers at Go Home Lake in Ontario's cottage country. In contrast to the idyllic setting, the family is rife with dysfunction. The parents rage at and abuse one another and their children as their marriage falls apart. Penny is raised with the unquestioned misogyny and heteronormativity characteristic of the era, and is at best ignored and at worst actively placed into dangerous situations by her parents, in addition to being sexually assaulted by her brothers. The characters are portrayed through the unforgiving lens of an abused child, leaving them without discernible motives, and the narrative is largely made up of events that are incomprehensible to a child, resulting in an awful, humiliating blur. Moments of affection are infrequent and generally swiftly followed by abuse, and readers will be relieved when they're allowed to follow Penny into moments of dissociation. The author fails to make any of the characters, even Penny, sympathetic. This kind of story of a seemingly normal family with an appalling secret has been far better told by other writers.
