Mirror Lake

By: Thomas Christopher Greene

Narrated by: Christopher Burns

Length: 5 hrs and 49 mins

Publisher's summary

Nathan Carter, a man in his 20s, moves from Boston to Eden, Vermont, following the death of his father and the end of yet another failed romance. When Carter's Jeep goes off the road in a snowstorm, 79-year-old Wallace Fiske nurses him back to health and the two become unlikely friends.

Wallace begins to tell Nathan his story, a love story he was prepared to take to the grave with him. It is a tale of passion, of obsession, and ultimately, of tragedy. Along the way, Nathan, suspecting that Wallace is not telling him the whole truth, sets out to discover for himself what happened here at the edge of this small mountain lake 50 years before.

In the process, Nathan not only discovers Wallace's dark secret, but also finds himself transformed by the experience, leading to an unforgettable conclusion.

©2003 Thomas Christopher Greene (P)2003 Highbridge Company

lovely read

a nice story which kept me engaged have a couple little surprises and satisfied at the end

Wonderful story from rural Vermont

A beautifully told tale of life in rural Vermont. Greene's novel features love and mystery rendered in rich, rhythmic language. His descriptions of land and season are particularly evocative, and his characters seem plucked from the New England landscape. The print version was a true page-turner; in listening to the book I often found myself sitting in the driveway caught up in the story. I hope to see more from this author.

Not Dolores Claiborne

A good read but not what I really expected from the overview. Also, the extended sections where the protagonist dwells on his libido would be something nice to skip over in a hard/paper copy of the book. And he shouldn't have sold the farm.

Romantic Clichi

I found this book a bit shallow. Archetypal commitment-phobe meets old curmudgeon with deep dark secret. Which wouldn't be too bad (why I originally decided to give it a try) except for the droning, humorless pace of the narrative and the naive vocabulary and sentence structure. Sometimes the storytelling sounded Biblical, definitely archaic, sometimes like pages from a fourth grade reader or a Grimm's Fairy Tale. In general I found very little irony or introspection, the characters boldly and simply drawn, unsophisticated in their life situations, the women especially devoid of nuance, their heads mostly filled with sex and romance. And, the narrator seemed to alternate between monotony and melodrama, lacking in subtlety. But if you like bucolic romance, this book is for you!