NEEDLE LAKE

An intense novel brimming with wonderful prose and careful observation, a story of two cousins, one a quirky and intelligent girl on the verge of adolescence and the other, a bit tainted from life already and just on the other side of it. This comes from the author of KNIFE RIVER, where Champine showed she knew how to delicately expose the dark side of a small town life..

Thirteen-year-old Ida was born with a hole in her heart and is forbidden from exerting herself too much. She goes to school in town but spends most of her time alone, reading and memorizing geography and everyone treats her like she's broken. She does secretly go swimming and has her private spot at Needle Lake. She has never left her hometown and works at the general store/boarding house her mother runs in their tiny logging town of Mineral, Washington. And one day late in the Fall her cousin Elna walks in. They haven't seen each other since they were young, and she's immediately drawn to her older cousin, who's everything Ida is not: mature, self-assured, charismatic, and daring. Elna lives in San Francisco, a city Ida's only seen as a dot on her globe. She doesn't treat Ida like she's a fragile kid whose heart might give out at any moment. She isn't scared off by Ida's tendency towards rigidity and fixation. She makes Ida feel alive and normal, almost beautiful. Ida is enraptured. But Elna's ideas for fun get a bit darker with each turn and then, on Christmas Eve, as the girls are out in the woods, a man that is a threat to Elna drowns in the lake as they watch, and the two cousins suddenly share a secret beyond the scope of anything Ida has dealt with before. Fear begins to mix in with the reverence Ida feels towards her cousin, especially as Elna suddenly becomes Ida's safest optionand potentially the most threatening. This novel is for fans of character- and relationship-driven suspense; books like Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn, In the Woods by Tana French, and The Exiles by Jane Harper; shows like Mare of Easttown and The Killing. Also for readers of propulsive, sharply observed, and ominous coming-of-age stories about obsessive relationships such as Milk Fed by Melissa Broder, and Big Swiss by Jen Beagin. And with the author's personal connection to autism as she was diagnosed as an adult, there is no doubt that this book is also for fans of strange, unreliable, yet loveable main characters in books like Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman, Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, and My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. Justine Champine's short fiction has appeared in Kenyon Review, Epoch, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is a founding staff member of No Tokens Journal. She lives in New York City.