On Mystic Lake: A Novel

What do you do when everything you hold dear, everything you believe yourself to be, proves not to be true? Like Scarlett O'Hara, you go home, if not to Tara, then to the last place that you felt like you. Award-winning author Kristin Hannah makes her hardcover debut by taking readers to just such a place in On Mystic Lake. As her only child leaves to study abroad and her husband admits his love for a younger woman, Annie Colwater feels invisible. Having devoted herself to being the best wife and mother she could be for the last 20 years, Annie no longer knows who she is. She heads home to her father and to Mystic, Washington--where she grew up, where the dreams she barely remembers first blossomed, and where her first love, Nick Delacroix, still lives. Back in Mystic, Annie receives a healthy dose of perspective: Nick's wife has recently committed suicide, leaving Nick to find solace in the bottom of a Scotch bottle while his 6-year-old daughter, Izzie--who hasn't spoken since her mother's death--is doing her best to "disappear" just like Mommy. Annie volunteers to care for Izzie, since Nick cannot understand what his grieving daughter needs. And in the process, Annie recovers herself, the woman she thought gone forever, while Nick realizes that his future lies with Annie and Izzie. Just when the future starts to look bright for the three, Annie is faced with a devastating choice between the life she thought had left her behind, and a new beginning with Nick and Izzie, who helped to unearth her forgotten dreams. Kristin Hannah has produced a treasure of a book, one that will make you cry and will strike a chord in anyone who has ever had to pick up the pieces and start over. --Alison Trinkle