Book Review - Arcadia Falls by Carol Goodman

Synopsis:  Meg Rosenthal is driving toward the next chapter in her life. Winding along a wooded roadway, her car moves through a dense forest setting not unlike one in the bedtime stories Meg used to read to her daughter, Sally. But the girl riding beside Meg is a teenager now, and has exchanged the land of make-believe for an iPod and some personal space. Too much space, it seems, as the chasm between them has grown since the sudden, unexpected death of Meg’s husband.

Dire financial straits and a desire for a fresh start take Meg and Sally from a comfortable life on Long Island to a tucked-away hamlet in upstate New York: Arcadia Falls, where Meg has accepted a teaching position at a boarding school. The creaky, neglected cottage Meg and Sally are to call home feels like an ill portent of things to come, but Meg is determined to make the best of it—and to make a good impression on the school’s dean, the diminutive, elegant Ivy St. Clare.

St. Claire, however, is distracted by a shocking crisis: During Arcadia’s First Night bonfire, one of Meg’s folklore students, Isabel Cheney, plunges to her death in a campus gorge. Sheriff Callum Reade finds Isabel’s death suspicious, but then, he is a man with secrets and a dark past himself.

Meg is unnerved by Reade’s interest in the girl’s death, and as long-buried secrets emerge, she must face down her own demons and the danger threatening to envelop Sally. As the past clings tight to the present, the shadows, as if in a terrifying fairy tale, grow longer and deadlier.

First Line:  ""We're lost," my daughter tells me for the third time in an hour."

Random Quote:  "I see Haruko and stop to look at her drawing.  She's drawn an anthropomorphic tree picking the fruit off its own boughs and stuffing them into its mount."

Review:  The fact that I found this under the bed while looking for a pair of shoes and had completely forgotten that I read it a couple of weeks ago and hadn't reviewed it with that week's stack of books pretty much says it all about how I felt about this book - it was just utterly forgettable. 

Mountain lake in the Catskills - Image via Wikipedia

I've enjoyed the two other books by Goodman that I've read, The Seduction of Water and The Lake of Dead Languages, but this one was really just so so.  In many ways this novel combines plot elements of the other two books - an isolated setting, a boarding school, a mystery from the past, fantastical elements - in a way that feels recycled.  It's like drinking tap water that's been boiled - yeah, it quenches your thirst and you won't get diseases from it, but it's kind of flat and flavorless.  Even in a book that's just okay Goodman puts words together nicely so I'll continue to read her stuff - this one just didn't really work for me.

Reading Challenges:  2010 100+ Reading Challenge, 2010 Support Your Local Library Reading Challenge