Lake news : a novel

I got very emotionally involved with this. . . . maybe I'm really a romantic at heart? Surely not! Cynic is my middle name!!

Lake News is the story of Lily Blake whose passion is for music and for performing. She has a comfortable, if not extravagant, life in Boston where she teaches music at a private school and moonlights as a singer in a posh dinner club. All that changes when an off-the-record conversation with a

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reporter about her friend, a newly promoted Cardinal in the Catholic church, is twisted into a libelous front page story of her supposed affair with the Cardinal. Suddenly, Lily's life is crumbling around her as countless reporters hound her and dismantle the reputation she has worked so hard to build for herself in Boston. Before long the negative publicity drives both her bosses to fire her, and she becomes a virtual prisoner in her apartment where even her neighbors are in a fury at the hoards of reporters laying siege to her building. Soon, Lily knows she has no choice but to return to the small hometown she wanted nothing more than to escape. But what will she find on the shores of Lake Henry? Will the denizens of her old town protect her or turn on her? Will she be able to patch up longstanding problems with her mother? And why does John Kipling, editor of the town's weekly Lake News, keep turning up? Is he looking for a story? Or is it something more?

This is not the sort of book that it takes rocket science to figure out. As a matter of fact, I'm sure you can guess just about all the answers to my questions. That said, though, I actually quite liked this book. Both Lily and John are fully fleshed out characters struggling with scars from the past and hurts from the present, each looking to somehow prove their worth to themselves and to their still difficult parents. It's easy (or perhaps I mean difficult?) to feel Lily's pain as her life is stolen out from under her based solely on lies and easy to know her uncertainty about how to go about remedying the situation. Lake Henry and its citizens are good-hearted, close-mouthed when it counts, and refreshingly quaint in that small town way. Delinsky's story has a great flow, unloading bits of intrigue and leaving a trail of romantic encounters between John and Lily that carries readers along to its satisfying conclusion. Lake News is a refreshingly good story that leaves you feeling quite fulfilled.

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not bad, ended better than real life but then most romance books do.

A great story & a well written book that was hard to put down.
I was sad to read 'the end'!

rabck from Bumma's book distribution; good story, although you knew what that there was going to be a happy ending. Lily, a caberet singer in Boston, was targeted in incorrect allegations in the press. Her Catholic Cardinal friend was issued a public apology by the press days later, but she had to

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leave town to escape the media and settled back in her old hometown of Lake Henry. The local newspaperman, John, used to work with the reporter who started the slander, and wants to uncover why he did it, the unethical workings and bring him down. In the background are strained family relationships for both John and Lily. The mystery of why kept me guessing until almost the very end. And you knew that Lily and John would sort of mend their fences with their families and wind up together.

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I've had this book on my reading pile for awhile and I kept setting it aside. For some reason, as the majority of my reading is at night before bedtime, I generally tend to shy away from hard cover and trade paperbacks due to the size and weight. But since it was vacation time, I decided to take

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this one with me and what a delightful reading surprise. This book is absolutely beautifully written - the vocabulary an artistic display and the story current beyond expectation.

The biggest surprise was in Chapter 18, when John is in the newsroom office..."Satisfied that Lily was being protected, he returned to the office with the small bits of news he collected and added them to the file for the next week's paper. He worked for a while on the cover story, which was the accidental shooting of a three-year-old child in Ashcroft the day before and, legislatively, the use and abuse of guns." I read these words and instantly flipped again to the copyright page and could hardly believe my eyes to view (c)1999 and to know that in 2013 - 14 years later we continue to see these headlines and the conversations continue without any end of violence in sight. How utterly sad.

Please understand that the storyline is not based on those few sentences. But for me, it heightened the storyline and the author's clarity in writing such a timeless story - that can be appreciated by all readers regardless of age, sex, socioeconomic background, etc. I wish with all my heart that this would be a mandatory read for every journalism major on a global venue. Thank goodness for vacations when we take the time to read outside of our normal comfort zones. There are unexpected treasures everywhere if you take the time to open the covers.

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