Lake People

Full of missing family, Maxwell's debut novel begins and ends with Alice, who was abandoned by her birth mother, grandmother, and adoptive mother. They are Jennifer, the poor unwed teen; Sophie, so class conscious that she denied that baby Alice was her son's; and Clara, whose life goes off track on a family vacation in Canada. In a small town in New Hampshire in the shadow of Mt. Washington, Alice is raised by her adoptive father, Paul. She spends her childhood adrift, emotionally unmoored, unknowingly seeking the family she does not know she has lost. Though the reader knows the secret of Alice's birth from the start, recognizing hints throughout her childhood, Alice doesn't find out she was adopted until her mid-twenties. Yet she feels the relentless pull of the lake and the boathouse where she was first found.