"Lost Lake House" by Elisabeth Grace Foley

I sometimes hate reading books on my Kindle app because if I don't blog about them right when I finish them, I forget to review them because I don't have a physical book sitting on the desk to remind me to write up a review.  Sigh.  Such is what happened with Elisabeth Grace Foley's latest novella.

This doesn't mean I didn't like this book!  Because I did.  It's set during Prohibition, an era I find fascinating.  There's almost a little bit of a Gatsby feel to it, like some of the people at Lost Lake House could also be those hanging out at Gatsby's parties.  And, of course, it's an updated version of "The Twelve Dancing Princesses."  That's one of my favorite fairy tales.

Lost Lake House revolves around Dorothy, teen daughter of a wealthy widower who is also a busy local politician and staunchly pro-Prohibition and anti-dancing.  Dorothy is young and restless.  She loves dancing, but her father won't let her attend even respectable society dances, so she sneaks out of the house night after night to go dancing at the Lost Lake House, combination nightclub and speakeasy.  

Then there's Marshall Kendrick, a nice boy who works for the Lost Lake House as a groundskeeper and boatman, earning money to help his Depression-stricken parents and siblings.  He gets sucked deeper and deeper into the speakeasy's illegal activities.  But when he sees Dorothy in the clutches of a wolf named Sloop Jackson, Marshall has a crisis of conscience, and together the two of them try to escape the illicit whirl of dancing and alcohol that fills Lost Lake House.

This is a fun story of a glitzy era gone by, but with some serious things to say about disobedience, truth, conscience, and whether or not innocence can be protected if it rushes headlong after experience.

Particularly Good Bits:

On cloudy nights like this the lake and sky and island all melted into a uniform invisible black, so the blazing golden windows of the Lost Lake House seemed suspended in the middle of the lake like a floating fairy palace.

Did they find something there that they really liked, or were they merely part of the facade, putting on a reckless show for each other and for the quiet, unseeing wooded shores of the midnight lake?

Dorothy looked up at the moon almost with dread -- its light had never seemed so bright and revealing before.  Under the lights of the Lake House she had never seen it at all.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG for alcohol use and a man trying to force a girl to kiss him.