Lake Effect

The year is 1977. The Larkin and the Finnegan families live across the street from each other. With kids nearly the same age, the families have been friends for years. On the surface, everything appears fine. But for the last several months, Nina Larkin and Finn Finnegan have been having an affair.

Divorce was still a dirty word in 1977, and even as divorce rates were on the rise, it was still something encountered only rarely. However, with both Nina and Finn in sterile marriages, Finn convinces Nina to temporarily run away with him, end their respective marriages, and marry each other.

Lake Effect explores the fallout of that decision, both immediately in 1977 and in the decades that follow. We see how it alters the lives of Finn and Nina, of course, but also the impact it has on the families' children and the spouses left behind. Eldest daughter Clara Larkin never forgave her mother for what she viewed as her choosing Finn over her children; eldest son Dune Finnegan took his anger out on Clara, with whom he had his own secret burgeoning relationship at the time of the divorce. The fallout of the pair's infidelity was both financial and social, hitting the Finnegan grocery stores as hard as it hit their standing in the community.

For a novel like this to work, the reader needs to be fully invested in the characters, and for some reason I never was. The characters are nuanced, which I typically appreciate, but that nuance left me neither cheering for nor against anyone in the story. D'Aprix Sweeney's choice for Sam Larkin's arc was especially curious. Sam harbors his own set of secrets, and while, like divorce, the societal viewpoints around those secrets look different today than they did in 1977, that sub-story was left feeling underserved. Meanwhile, viewpoints shift enough between Nina, Clara, Dune, Sam, and the families' youngest daughters Bridie and Fern that I never fully latched onto any of them. Package that with some concluding drama that felt gratuitous (perhaps because of my lack of character connection), and I finished the novel feeling unimpressed. This was mostly a miss for me.