It’s 1985, in the valley-of-the-squinting-windows type of small town that is Kettle Lake, a fishing community on the edge of Michigan’s Great Lakes. We follow Joanne ‘Joey’ Kennedy over the course of a formative teenage summer, as she navigates her sense of self and sexuality in tandem with the unspooling of her family.
The Polite Act of Drowning has all the evocative small-town drama and mystery of Celeste Ng, anything Reese Witherspoon has gone near recently and, also, Jessica Fletcher’s beloved Cabot Cove.
The backdrop to the summer of 1985 is the tragic drowning of a young girl, an accident which stirs up uncomfortable memories for this tightly knit community – especially for Joey’s mother, Rosemary. There are a lot of tangled dynamics here, friendships that tip and sway from the pressure of peers and social hierarchies, marriages on the brink and betrayals building up.
Hurtubise pulls the world of this coastal town into focus quickly and there’s a warm nostalgic streak running through her descriptions. Snapshots of the everyday in Kettle Lake are well framed, especially of the diner, where an older woman still sartorially committed to the sixties paces behind the Formica as if it were her cage, the customers watching her like an endangered bird.
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