Ladies of the Lake
After the loss of her parents, Adelaide MacNeill is sent from her home in Prince Edward Island to the Lakeside Ladies Academy in Connecticut. She bonds with Ruth, Susannah, and especially Dorothy (Dot), but Dot and Adelaide fall out when they fall in love with the same man--who faces his own challenges when the community rejects him and his German family during the Great War. Seventeen years later, Rosaline Murray is looking back on her years in school, certain she can never go back and be Adelaide MacNeill again.
This is apparently Christian fiction, which is not really my thing, but the touch is light enough that I didn't pick up on it until well into the story. The years in school stretched on a bit long here, before getting to some of the later years that were more interesting (to me) historically--especially some Canadian history that I wasn't very familiar with. In addition, this is also based on a real girls' school and on a correspondence between Lucy Maud Montgomery (author of Anne of Green Gables) and an orphan girl. There were definitely some things of interest here in this women-focused historical fiction, but for me, it falls into the range of "good, not great."
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Publisher’s Description
After two young women’s deep bond is torn apart, what will it take to bring them together again? In The Ladies of the Lake, the beloved author of Saving Amelie and Night Bird Calling returns with a transformative new historical novel about the wonder and complexities of friendship, love, and belonging.
When she is forced to leave her beloved Prince Edward Island to attend Lakeside Ladies Academy after the death of her parents, the last thing Adelaide Rose MacNeill expects to find is three kindred spirits. The “Ladies of the Lake,” as the four girls call themselves, quickly bond like sisters, vowing that wherever life takes them, they will always be there for each other. But that is before Before love and jealousy come between Adelaide and Dorothy, the closest of the friends. Before the dawn of World War I upends their world and casts baseless suspicion onto the German American man they both love. Before a terrible explosion in Halifax Harbor rips the sisterhood irrevocably apart.
Seventeen years later, Rosaline Murray receives an unsuspecting telephone call from Dorothy, now headmistress of Lakeside, inviting her to attend the graduation of a new generation of girls, including Rosaline’s beloved daughter. With that call, Rosaline is drawn into a past she’d determined to put behind her. To memories of a man she once loved . . . of a sisterhood she abandoned . . . and of the day she stopped being Adelaide MacNeill.
