The Inn At Lake Devine
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Average rating4
15
Ratings1
Average rating4
It's 1962 and Natalie Marx is shocked when her mother receives this reply to her enquiry about summer accommodation in Vermont: 'Our guests who feel most comfortable here, and return year after year, are Gentiles.' It was not complicated, as her mother pointed out. 'They had a hotel; they didn't want Jews. We were Jews.' For the intrepid twelve-year-old Natalie, the words are an infuriating, irresistible challenge. She manages to wangle an invitation to join a friend on holiday there - and, as her obsession begins with the family that has excluded her, she sets in train events which will change her life, and which will tie her forever to the eccentric family who run the Inn at Lake Devine
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I couldn't set the book down once I started it. Natalie's Jewish family receives a letter from an inn the family had hoped to visit which warns that non-Gentiles are not welcome there; Natalie takes this as a challenge. Thoughtful and fun. I think I've found a new author I love!
It didn't really take me a month to read this book. It took me about 4 days. Life interrupted.
This is probably the earliest Elinor Lipman books that I have read (though I did see the movie made from her first book.) All the classic Lipman skills are evident, just not as sharp. The dialogue is there, the quick wit, and the ever-surging plotline, but none quite as honed as her later books.
Somehow, I like it better. That there is a bit more description. A few side trips. How it takes her more time to explore the depth and changes of her characters. I'm up for the slower, weightier Lipman.
Times change. The svelte dialogue and rushed plots of her more recent works fit our world now. But this book came out in 1998 and was set almost 30 years earlier. It was a slower time. No computers. No smart phones. No internet. Just people meeting people where they were.
In this case, the impetus for the story was a letter, stating Gentiles were preferred at the title's namesake inn. Imagine my surprise when the back of the book acknowledgements mentioned the author's mother. It said “Julia Lipman, who remembered after thirty-five years the exact working of the letter from the hotel on the lake.”
Art inspired by real life is always the best.
