Enchantment Lake A Northwoods Mystery by Margi Preus

200 Pages
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press, Univ of Minnesota Press
Release Date: March 15, 2015

Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Children’s Fiction, Teens, Young Adult

Francesca “Francie” Frye is seventeen living in New York. She gets a frantic telephone form her elderly aunts. They believe someone is trying to kill them. She hops on a plan to investigate. There is a lot of suspicious or accidental deaths among the residents. Her first night on the island, the local handyman is found dead from an apparent suicide.

Everyone things she is a detective from New York because she played one on television. There is a developer, Buck Thorn, offering to buy everyone’s cabins. When the developer is poisoned and one of the aunts is arrested, Francie must prove she did not do it. The book is fast paced, the characters are somewhat developed, and it is written in the third person point of view.

<i>enchantment lake</i> is a mystery novel filled with potential. we have a scrappy and investigative heroine, her two eccentric aunties, a rural lakeside setting populated with interesting folks, some murderous intrigue, and even the promise of hidden treasure.

all this would make for a fun middle grade mystery. unfortunately, this book isn't sure what it wants to be. the lighthearted tone, old-fashioned small town vibes, and family themes are incongruous with the scene girl on the cover, and with the fact that our protagonist, frenchy, is 17. this kid comes off as about 13, and yet we're supposed to believe she's an independent older teen who lives by herself in NYC when she's not visiting her aunts.

this book could be so much more successful if frenchy were younger and it were marketed as a good clean middle grade mystery!

beyond that, it's a fun story. there are poetic moments, and the prose often evokes pretty lakeside imagery. there's an entertaining cast of side characters (including a potter named potter, and someone named buck thorne with a wife named rose thorne). and there are clever moments that give off lemony snicket vibes, which is great.

the mystery itself is predictable as hell. i identified the villain as soon as they were introduced, but at the end we still have a laboriously dramatic twisty scene when their identity is revealed. but that's forgivable in a middle grade novel, and this truly does feel like middle grade.

Thank you to NetGalley and University of Minnesota Press for providing me with a copy of this book in return for an honest (and belated) review.

This story takes place in the north woods of Minnesota. 17-year-old Francie living in New York goes to rural Minnesota to see what her eccentric aunts are up to. She encounters many mysterious deaths. The locals think she is a detective, because her aunts led them to believe that since Francie had an acting role as a detective in New York. Francie solves the murders, basically.

The book feels like it is written for kids around 4th-7th grade (depending on their reading ability), but it has a lot of themes that make it feel more YA. Murder is written about in such a way that it's not a terrible act of evil, but just a silly thing that happens sometimes.

The story was oddly cute and fast paced but It felt juvenille and didn't have any extra spice (action/romance/magic) to off set it.