Rating: 
Summary: Too Predictable
Review: This book essentially rips off The Secret History by Donna Tart. While the storylines are different in some ways there similarities are too many to ignore. The focus on Classical Studies, the reenactment of ancient Greek rituals...those things aside the book doesn't develop characters well (it's hard to tell apart Jane Hudson's three female students, all we know is they are goth and take her latin class) and the plot "twists" are utterly predictable. Who is the person secretly stalking Jane? I figured it out almost immediately. What is the big secret that Domina Chambers tells Lucy? Not too tough to grasp if you read a little into how the woman treats Lucy...And what was that ending? It was painful to read. Everything is wrapped up in a nice neat little package. Again, it was utterly predictable.The book had potential, I liked the basic ideas but they just weren't developed effectively.
Rating: 
Summary: Big Let Down
Review: I should not even write a review of this book since I have not finished it. But I can not. And I will not. This book actually started out really good. But after the introdution of all the characters, it went down hill rapidly. About half way through the book, I got sick of the Latin Lessons! The Latin was even more interesting than the long descriptions of the Lake and the water and the ice and the path and the woods and the rocks and the snow and give me a break! There was one very interesting paragraph about how ice forms on a lake. That was a nice little lesson I guess I missed in High school earth science class. The book had so much potential! OH Well!
Rating: 
Summary: Not as good as I had hoped for.
Review: This story revolves around Jane, Lucy, Deirdre and Matt....and of course the lake. It seems to take on a character of its own. Jane graduated from a boarding school on Heart Lake and began her subsequent life. Events of her life however lead her back to her alma mater where she teaches Latin. Strange events begin to take place once she is back at the school though. It seems that someone has found a long lost journal and her experiences from the past are being re-enacted by her current students. Jane can only solve this mystery by confronting her past and uncovering the truth of exactly what happened in her senior year on the lake. The story had a few twists and turns, though predictable. I didn't find myself actually liking any of the characters however. There was never any real sense of friendship between Jane, Lucy and Deirdre. I felt like they were all using each other for their own purposes. They seemed to be able to shrug off tragedy at a whim, i.e. someone falls into the ice and drowns and they just pick themselves up, dust themselves off and go back to school! I do not see any real emotion here. The lake itself is described endlessly. While it does play a pivotal role in the story, I felt the characters needed to be fleshed out more and the lake descriptions curtailed a little more. All in all, just an okay read.
Rating:
Summary: Bleh.
Review: Jane Hudson, the protagonist of this overwrought and under-written book, is a supposedly bright woman who, nevertheless, can't seem to put two and two together. The plot is intricate, but only in the way a train wreck is intricate. The story depends heavily on a series of unlikely omissions and on Jane's apparent inability to recognize... well, just about anybody, ever. Descriptions are sparse and clumsy and, in most cases, act as little more than an excuse for awkward foreshadowing, hastily introducing a character trait or prop just in time for it to be used, a few pages later, to advance the increasingly unlikely plot. A barely passable mystery, all in all, but not worthy of the comparisons it has drawn with Donna Tartt's far superior _Secret History._
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