Name: In the Lake of the Woods
Rating: 3.625 (16 reviews)
ISBN: 9780618709861

Tim O'Brien

In the Lake of the Woods

This remarkable new novel from the National Book Award-winning author of Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried combines the power of the finest Vietnam fiction with the tension of a many-layered mystery. It begins in a remote lakeside cabin deep in the Minnesota forests, where Kathy Wade is comforting her husband John, an ambitious politician, after a devastating electoral defeat. Then one night she vanishes, and gradually the search for Kathy becomes a voyage into the darkest corners of John Wade's life, a life of deception and deceit - the life of a man able to escape everything but the chains of his darkest secret.

In the lake of the woods

Excellent. A book full of doubt. Two flawed people, lost in time and to each other. When Kathy goes missing, John’s tenuous grip on life starts to loosen. 

The book has no resolution. Which is a good - and useful - thing. There are a number of chapters devoted to hypotheses of what happened to Kathy, and John himself is no help: we don’t know if he’s being honest, or just providing some sleight of hand to throw us off the scent. The back stories and the treatment of the massacre of a Vietnamese village id very well handled. An excellent book, and is lack of finality and certainty pleases me. 

Jan Jackson

Excellent. A book full of doubt. Two flawed people, lost in time and to each other. When Kathy goes missing, John’s tenuous grip on life starts to loosen. 

The book has no resolution. Which is a good - and useful - thing. There are a number of chapters devoted to hypotheses of what happened to Kathy, and John himself is no help: we don’t know if he’s being honest, or just providing some sleight of hand to throw us off the scent. The back stories and the treatment of the massacre of a Vietnamese village id very well handled. An excellent book, and is lack of finality and certainty pleases me. 

In the Lake of the Woods

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