Why a Booktrail?
2000s: Sometimes the more you run, the more you find you can’t move
The Room by the Lake
What you need to know before your trail
Caitlin, a young vulnerable English woman tries to escape her problems by heading over to New York. She’s lonely at first so tries to make friends and this is how she meets the enigmatic Jake. Recognising a sense of adventure in him and a sense that he is someone she wants to be around.
Their relationship grows quickly, she meets his parents. Then they head out to an island retreat. And that’s when the trouble starts.
Travel Guide
New York –
The Bronx
This is the Bronx, Unchartered territory for a tourist, and though my surroundings look leafy and harmless maybe going to the end of the line was a bad idea.
She’s been told by a cab driver that a girl like her should watch her back and not go east of Prospect Park. More worryingly, ‘nothing good happens after a hundred and tenth” Caitlin emerges from the South Ferry Plaza and starts to explore.
She explores the city, the city and streets she thinks she knows as they look familiar. She’a very aware of her surroundings and the aesthetics from the leafy respite of Washington Square and the glaring lights on Times Square.
“There’s rage in the streets here, a general thrum of aggression powering the city through its never-sleeping existence.
The kind of city where Hell’s Kitchen is the name of a desirable neighbourhood remarks Caitlin
Upstate NY
Jake’s parents live in Upstate New York , a two hour driver from the city. Monticello is the place where you can catch a bus back to the city but the nearest town to this cabin retreat is Forest burgh
The house itself
After Forestburgh, Jake takes the car off the road, but it’s just a barely formed road with undergrowth and barely wide to drive down as the trees area whipping hard against the windows. Then there is a flash of light and the clutching branches fall aways “clattering loudly like a parting shot against the back window right as the house comes fully into view, incongruously bright white in the sun”
“We’re pretty much surrounded by forest here, two hundred acres of it is private”
Booktrailer Review
Susan: @thebooktrailer
Lots of young girls head out to a new city, new country even for an adventure, you grab at any new opportunity you can, you talk to strangers in bars to make friends, you wander the streets and you are open to new things and new experiences. That’s the fun part of travel and that’s how this story starts but it soon escalates into something all the more horrendous.
Caitlin is vulnerable and not very street wise it seems. A few bad decisions early on catapults her into ‘Ooh I wouldn’t go there territory” but her vulnerability and wish to stand on her own two feet take her places she might not otherwise have gone.
A cabin in the woods with a new boyfriend – or a dangerous remote lake house where you really are in the wilds of nowhere. Somewhere in Upstate New York but far away from civilization and the few buses which run back to the reassuring chaos of the city.
There are some far fetched moments as you might expect but then this is a story of extremes. Why a girl would fall for such a man, do what she does next and explain the unfolding events in her own head make for a shocking story of how your mind can trick you and how a person can fall into a trap of their own making
Upstate New York has never felt so dark and creepy, a million miles away from the chaos of NYC but here, the forest is suffocating, the silence deafening and the chance to escape impossible. A thrilling read that keeps you gulping for air.
Booktrail Boarding Pass: The Room by the Lake
Author/Guide: Emma Dibdin Destination: New York, NYC Departure Time: 2000
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