Lake People

A great deal of my reading appears to be taken up with memoirs and women's fiction along with a bit of mystery and suspense.  Lake People, by Abi Maxwell is a book that looked interesting to me as I read a synopsis and falls more under the category of literary fiction, something I also enjoy from time to time.  As I began to read  I found myself confused by the second chapter.  Rarely do I restart a book, but I received this one through Amazon Vine, and wanted to make a real effort to see where I started to get a bit off track. Eventually I did review the synopsis on Amazon and was grateful to see some reviewers expressing a bit of confusion as well.  Once I learned that this is a novel of interconnected short stories, I was free to read along much more pleasurably and appreciate the beauty of the writing.
Since it is a novel of short stories that are connected, the narration changes throughout the chapters.  Alice was adopted by a couple as an infant after she was found in a boathouse on a lake.  As an adult she continues to try and find the place where she belongs, always close to or connected to the lake.  She is from a family of women connected to the lake: Eleonora, who brought her family to Kettleborough's lake, Signe, an aunt who never married and tried to drown herself in the lake and now Alice who also feel the pull of this body of water.
Reading Abi Maxwell's writing reminded me of the way I felt when I read Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. There is such beauty to the writing that re-reading the first few chapters allowed me to absorb more from this story.