A review by rachelakelso
Echo Lake by Letitia Trent

4.0

Letitia Trent and I met a decade or so ago and bonded over weird, rural Oklahoma stuff, so when I found out she had written a book with this setting and it was in the genre of my heart (gothic) I snapped it up. I grew up between two haunted lakes (Oklahoma is full of them,) one covering a town and the other settled land, and they filled our rural farm with spooky, weird smelling fog. A pastor killed his wife and then drove his car into one of them a few years back. This novel was consequently very real to me, the strange small town of Heartshorne like many I have visited. I can't remember the last time I read something and so often thought, "Ahh, I know that feeling, that smell, that memory."

I love when poets write prose, there is a magical disregard for the rigid and formulaic structure in most novels that I find invigorating, inspiring, and exciting to read. It feels like growth in a medium where things don't really change that much.