The Girl in the Lake by India Hill Brown

 

I live near a pretty bustling Little Free Library and I am always trekking over to it with a backpack full of books and offloading my past reads before checking out what's new. The upside of it being so busy is that I'm constantly finding cool things in there that I might not have found or picked up otherwise, like this book: THE GIRL IN THE LAKE. Look at that cover and tell me that you don't feel the slow creep of dread wrapping itself around you like a tattered cloak.

Despite the pretty creepy cover, THE GIRL IN THE LAKE isn't that scary. That said, the cover creeped me out enough that I definitely stored the cover upside-down because I didn't want the demon-eyed little girl watching me while I slept. I'M ONLY HUMAN, OKAY? But the cover is literally the scariest thing about the book. The creeps served up in this book are basically a 1.5 on the Goosebumps scale. I'm still traumatized from WELCOME TO DEAD HOUSE, even as an adult.

Celeste is taken to her grandparents' lakehouse along with her brother, Owen, to hang out with their cousins, Daisy and Capri. Celeste just failed a swim test so the plan seems to be to make her be like, "Oh, swimming is actually fun!" with bougie lake exposure. But the lake actually is not fun, and the house actually seems to be haunted.

Celeste was a decent main character. I liked that the author allowed her to be a little bratty (as little kids are) but she also wanted to be nice and be thought of as nice. The "mystery" of her great-aunt wasn't all that mysterious and I thought it was a little shitty how they kept gaslighting the kids. But as a kid, I remember asking my mom if she would believe me if I told her there was some ghost shit happening in our house and she straight up lied to my face and said, "Yes honey," when we both know it would have been straitjacket o' clock if I started talking about werewolves and ghosts and green slime. Soooo I guess a little bit of suspension of disbelief is required.

If you like Goosebumps, I think you'll love this. It's cheesy but offers some great commentary about the history of racial segregation in the U.S. and I learned some interesting facts about Dorothy Dandridge.

2.5 to 3 out of 5 stars