Lake Overturn

Lake Overturn

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3.96 of 5 stars 3.96  ·  rating details  ·  224 ratings  ·  78 reviews
Eula, Idaho, is a cluster of steeples, oak trees, and boxlike homes sandwiched between golden fields and a wide-open sky. It freezes in the winter and bakes in the summer, but the air is so dry that neither extreme gets under your skin. It has never seen a battle, or an earthquake, or a Democrat in City Hall.

Still, life in Eula is anything but simple.

Lina and Connie are si...more
Hardcover, 448 pages
Published April 21st 2009 by Harper
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Lisa Vallier
If you read, you'll like Lake Overturn by Vestal McIntyre. This is a unique and compelling story set in a small town in Idaho but really about Anytown, USA. Two young boys read of a natural disaster, called Lake Overturn, that happened in 1986 in Cameroon, West Africa. One of the boys, Enrique, decides to base his upcoming science project on the phenomenon. He asks his friend to be his partner but the friend proves to be more of a project than the model they build.


Enrique, his mother and brothe...more
Jenny Shank
From NewWest.Net

"Lake Overturn"
by Vestal McIntyre
Harper, 444 pages, $24.99

Nampa, Idaho native Vestal McIntyre packs the life of a whole town into his accomplished debut novel, "Lake Overturn", set in the fictional Eula, outside of Boise. The characters are fresh and distinct with richly imagined inner lives, and they intersect with each other in unexpected ways.

McIntyre writes about people in every level of Eula society with sensitivity and insight, from Abby Hall, the privileged Stanford-boun...more
EZRead eBookstore
We have a modern literary epidemic, admit it. Symptoms include apathetic narrators, shorter novels, yawn-inducing stories of the ultra-rich, unsympathetic characters, and the same old drivel about ultra hip city life. The cure is Vestal McIntyre, taking us back to a time when penicillin cured everything and characters were substantial, interesting, and freakishly relatable. Maybe I tire of a rich girl crisis or Sex and the City escapism, but for some reason, “Lake Overturn” was a big glass of wa...more
Judith
In 2001 there was a natural disaster in Cameroon, West Africa and 1,700 people were killed in their sleep from a mysterious fog arising from Lake Nyos. This really happened but the rest of the book is fiction. I loved this book. I loved reading it and I loved thinking about it when I wasn't reading it. What made this book so attractive was the realistic portrayal of such a diverse population of characters and such a multi-dimensional story.

The story is about a small town in Idaho where the peo...more
Donovan Richards
Literary fiction takes many forms. Sometimes it takes the shape of social satire placed within a simple narrative, other times it takes the form of an author, self-aware of the words he or she places on the page, and even still, other times it takes the form of a complexly interwoven plot. Partly masterful and partly mundane, Vestal McIntyre's Lake Overturn follows the characters of a small town of Eula in rural Idaho. Even though the setting and characters in this book strikingly resemble Napol...more
Anya
This book could be a how-to manual for anyone trying to write literary fiction. I've read a lot of other novels like this one--teenagers and adults in a small American city come of age and face various crises. But McIntyre creates a seemless flow between their points of view, and even though the characters' stories are familiar, that doesn't make them less resonant.

Reading this, I kept thinking of Dan Chaon's books and stories, which are set in a very similar world. Chaon's stuff is weirder and...more
Peggy
This is the story of Eula, Idaho, a small town with interesting characters living in it. It is the story of generations and what happens in their lives. Most of the book is about the people who live in a small trailer park. Some are of Mexican hertiage, some of native American and some are of mixed heritage. Connie and Lina are 2 single mothers who live there with their children. Their sons, Gene and Enrique are misfits, but the are brilliant in their own ways.

Connie is a nurses aide who cares...more
Ray
I have a hard time with the rating system here. Largely because I think about reading more in relation to the parts of a novel rather than their sum. In this case, the sum was disappointing but the prose was very good for the first half and decent for the second. And from moment to moment I was enthralled.

However, if I were to be fair this is proably a 3 start book.

Writing from the POV of something like nine characters is perhaps over-reaching. I enjoyed each person's story and I appreciate that...more
Jennifer W
So far my main critique is that all the characters sound very similar and are not well introduced. I just finished a chapter in which 3 new characters are introduced, 1 "older" woman and 2 teenage young men. I still don't know how old the woman is, though she pretends to be the mother to one of the boys. So far, I'm not convinced that I'm reading the same book that everyone else seems to be raving about.

After finishing I still don't know what everyone was raving about. The characters were flat....more
Emily
Lake Overturn by Vestal McIntyre is one of the best books I have read in a very long while. It is a rare author who can introduce us to a cast of enchanting characters, while creating an intriguing story has well. McIntyre has succeeded on both counts.

Set in a typical Small Town, USA (Eula, Idaho), the reader is introduced to myriad personalities, each of whom the author gently breaths life into until you feel like you've known them your whole life. The story itself evokes themes of striving for...more
Monika
I have been reading memoir after memoir and watching bravo reality television episode after shitty bravo reality television episode. needless to say, my brain is melting and all of this trash consumption has hindered my ability to enjoy scripted television and fiction. it's all so sad.

I can thank Vestal McIntyre for writing such a gripping book and restoring my faith that I, too, can read fiction.

I got frustrated (but was still gripped) towards the end when skipping between character plots bec...more
Frederick
The central characters of this novel are Enrique and Gene, two middle-school kids of the CALVIN AND HOBBES-era (the mid-1980's, of course), who are planning to make a science fair presentation involving a replication of a natural disaster. They want to show that Lake Overlook, near their hometown of Eula, Idaho, can undergo the same thing that has happened in a lake in India: The burping of the lake, if you will, causing a deadly gas to escape. The opening of the novel (the title of which caught...more
Lucinda Mcintyre
Vestal McIntyre's sometimes touchingly funny, sometimes heartbreaking view of residents of a small Idaho town (could be any small town America)provided an achingly realistic porait of a variety of characters as they live their everyday lives in the "quiet despiration" that is so much of our existance. These are characters that you will know - dealing with the same drives and pulls, acomplishments and frustrations that we live with everyday. Some succumb to the smallest temptations - some triumph...more
Gregg
This novel centers around the various residents of small town Eula, Idaho. Many, if not most, of them lead sad, desperate lives. There are a lot of different storylines going on here touching upon a lot of different themes: poverty, race, class, drugs, religion, family, sexuality, infidelity, infertility... One of the challenges for me was keeping all the characters straight.

This is a book where the more I read, the more I liked it. Probably my greatest disappointment was with the ending. For t...more
Sean
This is a wonderful book; very nicely layered, complicated, and thoughtful. McIntyre writes of messy lives as compact, and interconnected, tying together a natural phenomenom at Lake Nyons in Cameroon Africa with two young boys in Eula Idaho who try to reconstruct the same effect on their own Lake Overlook.

The novel features 10 or so characters, at varying levels of commitment. McIntyre is the author of "You Are Not the One" a collection of short stories, and this novel reads like a collection a...more
Javier Martinez
I first heard about Vestal McIntyre in Out Magazine and picked up his first book titled You Are Not The One: Short Stories. What an amazing array of characters so colorful and so full of life. He has a way of describing every little detail its like one is actually in the story. Lake Overturn was no exception. Each character is unique, raw and not without moral flaws. What an amazing author I really could not stop reading. Their are tender moments and funny ones, frightening moments and ones that...more
George Ilsley
Beautifully written account of small town life. Confusing at times, as it jumped around among the many characters, not all of whom are memorable. This book would have easily merited 5 stars, except for a weak ending which, inexplicably, focused on a tangential character. What happens with Enrique, our young gay hero? We don't know. Maybe his brother gives him a car. But his age mate Gene in the same time frame lands a job at some sort of lay away emporium (do such things exist?) and thrives in t...more
Christopher Castellani
I am utterly in love with this novel, as much for its expansiveness as its intimacy. Like the best Victorian novels, *Lake Overturn* gives you a portrait of a time and place without sacrificing the full humanity of its characters. Somehow, McIntyre is able to get into the hearts and minds of multiple characters of various ages and backgrounds. This is one of those books that is greater than the sum of its many parts, a feeling you get immediately upon finishing it, especially after the stunning...more
Liam O'brien
Clearly a labor, as so many first novels are; funded by the NEA and encouraged by Yaddo, McIntyre's first novel is a meandering, overstuffed ensemble small-town drama set in Idaho in the mid-80s. Mormons, teenagers, mothers, fathers, dying folks, drug addicts, and a science fair all orbit each other in a sort of detail-heavy, slow-cooked race towards an unclear finish. I give it 3 because while McIntyre's clearly very talented, the center really doesn't hold with Lake Overturn. It's about 2/3rds...more
Kyle
I first stumbled across this book in San Francisco at A Different Light, shortly before the author was set to come discuss it. It looked interesting, but I never picked it up, figuring I could get it when I arrived home. Well, two years later I finally managed to find a copy and read it.

Lake overturn is a phenomena where carbon dioxide collects at the bottom of a lake and finally bubbles up to the surface, where it escapes and can kill anybody in its path. This, essentially, is what the story is...more
Martin
This was chosen for our book club and I was a little excited to read it. Well....I couldn't decide whether this was a 2.5 or a 3 for me. It seems like most books I read these days are just an average 3 star.

There was nothing earth shattering or enlightening here and the metaphor of the toxic lake was "piqueing" to my interest but it just didn't do that much for me. I think the author was trying to cover too many bases here and it read a little bit like a soap opera.

Lake Overtun is an easy read b...more
K.M. Soehnlein
This beautifully written book has the sprawl of a Victorian novel with the care and attention to detail of the best contemporary short story.

McIntyre brings to life an entire town in Idaho over the course of a year in the mid-1980s. I'm amazed at his powers of observation -- and the even-handed way he presents so many different types of people: a Mexican woman and the Mormon man whose house she cleans; her two sons, one gay and one a bully; the Christian mom in the trailer next door, whose own...more
Chris
In the spirit of Raymond Carver, Vestal McIntyre’s remarkable debut novel, Lake Overturn, profiles the small American town of Eula, Idaho where the seemingly ordinary lives and mundane existences of some of its residents prove to be anything but simple and routine. Told from several different perspectives, the novel’s main characters include the youngsters, Enrique and Gene, who live beside each other in a trailer park, Lina and Connie, their respective mothers, Wanda, a recovering addict, and h...more
Rebecca
January 2010 update:
I think back on this novel so often as I read other great books, that I had to return and give it 5 stars, even though I wouldn't necessarily call it a "favorite". Below is my original August 2009 review:

This is a beautiful novel, definitely in the top tier. I was so immediately captivated by the story, I finished it one day. While not one of my absolute favorites, if I could, I would give it 4.5 stars. The book’s narrative reminded me of great ensemble acting in movies with...more
Elizabeth K.
Nov 13, 2009 Elizabeth K. rated it 3 of 5 stars
Recommended to Elizabeth by: NYT Book Review
Shelves: 2009-new-reads
I am very unclear as to how I feel about this book. It takes place in the 1980s, set in a small town in Idaho, the plot covers multiple characters and their interactions, direct and indirect. There are a lot of Issues here. Everyone has a big Issue looming over them - the kid who is figuring out his sexuality, the man having an affair, the girl whose mother is terminally ill, the woman readjusting to having her teenage son return from foster care ... everyone is a Lifetime movie. And a big part...more
Tal Goretsky
This beautiful novel embraces you from the beginning and pulls you into a story both dark and hopeful. Set in a small town in Idaho in the mid-80s, the story is told through several characters: two outcast junior-high boys navigating through the jock-ruled world of school; their single mothers - neighbors in the "good part" of a trailer park; a well-meaning 30-year old woman who can't help spiraling into trouble; her older brother, the school bus-driver; and two high-school girls who can't wait...more
Alex
I actually met Vestal McIntyre about a year-and-a-half ago, at a literary seminar. He's unassuming, funny, clearly smart, and had just sold Lake Overturn. He couldn't, or didn't describe it to me as anything other than hard to describe.

For me, Lake Overturn is very describable, and I'd use the same words I used to describe it's author. Unassuming: the novel is seemingly a quite simple collection of stories, set in a small, Idaho town, over the course of a about a year. Funny: the novel is dark b...more
Melissa
They say you should write what you know and I couldn't stop thinking that Vestal McIntyre either must know the most varied types of people or he must have amazing psychic insight. He creates interesting characters (to the point where you start to have visceral reactions to them) and he writes them well. Not only are the characters intriguing, but the setting is almost a character in itself. McIntyre has a quiet, quirky descriptiveness, and I enjoyed the fleshing out of the environment as much as...more
Lisa
This magnificent novel explores the social strata of a small town in Idaho in the 1980s. The prose is lush, the observations keen, and the plot engrossing to the last page; but what sets this book apart is McIntyre’s utter sympathy for all of his characters. From Connie, the fundamentalist whose reading of the Bible is too literal even for her own church, to Wanda, the addict who yearns to be a mother, to Enrique, a junior high school misfit who can occasionally be as cruel as his tormentors in...more
Jason Tougaw
I've read this book twice, and I couldn't put it down either time. The characters are like crystal: beautiful, refracting evertying around them, breakable but pretty strong. The plot is almost nineteenth century, with lives intersecting unexpectedly and with a satisfying ending. Maybe we need more 19C-style plots written in the contemporary American vernacular. There's not a tiny dot of bullshit here. I say read this book.
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Lake Overturn: A Novel (Paperback)
Lake Overturn: A Novel (ebook)
Lake Overturn  (Kindle Edition)
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Vestal McIntyre was born and raised the youngest of seven children outside Nampa, Idaho. He attended Tufts University, and has lived in Boston and New York City.

Lake Overturn: A Novel was published by HarperCollins in April, 2009. The Washington Post said, "In Lake Overturn, McIntyre has created a vast, intricate lattice of relationships, reminiscent of the novels of Richard Russo....Here is an au...more
More about Vestal McIntyre...
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