If your household's summer vacation was canceled this year, console and distract yourself with Lake Life, the tale of a family getaway gone very wrong...The novel is less concerned with the origins of dysfunction than with how it plays out...There's a lot of bad behavior here, perhaps because Poissant is so good at writing it. His prose throughout is sure-footed and intelligent...[He] also leaves room for absorbing discussions of art, the socioeconomics of vacation property development, and religion.-Jean Thompson for The New York Times Book Review
Lake Life establishes Poissant as one of the South's best new writers working today. It is a dazzling work that is so confidently crafted, so keenly perceptive and so deeply compassionate, it's hard to believe it was written by someone this early in his career.-Suzanne Van Atten, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Masterfully crafted...Simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious, the novel's brisk pace and perfectly executed moments make for a stunning, unforgettable story...Poissant's compassion for his characters generates empathy for even their most disastrous actions. A totally engrossing story of the long shadows cast by troubled relationships and the glimmer of hope that dawns after painful confrontation. -Booklist (starred review)
Poissant demonstrates superb talent for observation, cultivating a familiar, lived-in feeling of the family's lake house, where each character's unique viewpoint emerges powerfully and their everyday interactions gain greater significance. This is a remarkable, moving depiction of a family on the brink. -Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Poissant is one of our most talented local writers and we've been waiting for this, his first novel, for what feels like a very long time. If 2020 did nothing else good, at least it brought us this book. -Orlando Weekly (Staff Pick and Best Book of 2020)
Lake Life is a lyrically inventive and emotionally generous novel. Poissant is a gifted chronicler of the fault lines that lie just below family life. -Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation and the New York Times bestseller Weather
A beautiful story about family and especially about the paradox of adult children. Vividly imagined and carefully rendered, Lake Life is both generous and unflinching. I loved every member of this functionally dysfunctional cast.-Karen Joy Fowler, author of the New York Times bestsellers The Jane Austen Book Club and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
By turns moving, tender, and wryly funny, this gorgeously-written ensemble novel about the unspoken dreams and secrets and self-deceptions of a middle class family is deeply insightful and rewarding. David James Poissant is a young writer to watch! -Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will
Lake Life is an absolute wonder. By turns tender and wrenching, gorgeous and haunting, it explores what can emerge from the wake of tragedy and the depths of love. David James Poissant is a writer of the highest order, and this stunning novel is one readers will never forget.-Bret Anthony Johnston, author of the international bestseller Remember Me Like This
Lake Life is a beautifully written, expertly told novel about family and tragedy and love and loss. I was gripped from the very first page, and wanted desperately to know what would become of the Starling family and their lives. David James Poissant captures so beautifully the tangled love between parents and children, and how that love evolves and unfolds over time. That kind of love is not without consequence, and Poissant explores with dazzling prose and insight just how maddening and hopeful the bonds of family can be. Lake Life is a page-turner-I read it in one long sitting, resentful of interruption-and when it ended I mourned the absence of the Starling parents and children and their spouses, and wished them well. I loved this book. -Anton DiSclafani, New York Times bestselling author of The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls and The After Party
When you find yourself thinking about a novel's characters well after you've finished reading it, wondering about them and how they're doing as though they were friends of yours, family, it means that you've found something truly special: one of those books that's not just about life but somehow contains it. Poissant's characters linger just that hauntingly, and his novel breathes with just that kind of life.-Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead and The Illumination
Poissant has written us a book that reveals the danger and the pain, the humor and the love affairs of our everyday lives as a thrilling high stakes adventure. Every moment in Lake Life is so full of tension that I could never find a good place to stop reading...so I stayed up late to finish instead. Here is a dysfunctional family I was rooting for even as I clapped my hands over my face and watched them choose wrong again and again. A humane and wise book about a family getting into all sorts of trouble. I am obsessed with the Starlings. -CJ Hauser, author of The From-Aways and Family of Origin
Lake Life is a terrific story, one that, over the course of a long weekend shadowed by random tragedy, delves into a family's messy history, and finds there not only pain, but-thrillingly-stubborn survival, hope, and love. The Starling family will be with me a long time. I'm grateful for this book. -Christopher Coake, author of You Came Back, winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Fellowship and one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists 2
David James Poissant's first novel is a model of how to render the souls of his many equally delineated and dramatized characters. Told in stirring language, it is the complex story of contemporary Americans, each dealing with a brand of loss: of children, of youth, of self-control, and of destiny. Here is a book that is heartbreaking and true, lilting and swooping, dark and light, wry and touching.-Michael Carroll, winner of the 2015 Sue Kaufman Prize and author of Little Reef and Stella Maris
