Book review: Arcadia Falls

I recently read Arcadia Falls by Carol Goodman and really enjoyed it.

Meg Rosenthal, whose husband recently died, accepts a position teaching a folklore class at a private school in New York.  The book begins with her and her teenage daughter in the car moving from Great Neck to the school, just outside of the small town of Arcadia Falls.  The dean of the school has told Meg that they can live in a house on campus where the founders of the school, Vera Beecher and Lily Eberhardt, had lived.  Meg's daughter, Sally, is angry at her mom for moving her away from all of her friends, and acts accordingly.  Right before school begins, the students hold a ceremony saying goodbye to the summer (played by a senior named Isabel) and hello to fall (played by a senior named Chloe).  When the students chase summer away into the woods, Isabel runs too far and falls into a ravine and dies.

Meg is excited about working at the Arcadia School partly because she has been writing her PhD dissertation about the work of Vera Beecher and Lily Eberhardt; she figures the school will have papers and writings that she had not had access to earlier.  The school was initially founded at Vera's family's country house by Vera and Lily as an artists' community, mainly for women who didn't necessarily want to get married and have kids (and, in Vera's mind, be forced to stop creating art).  After a few years, they made it a formal school.

After the school was founded, Lily died under slightly mysterious conditions.  She fell into the same ravine that Isabel fell into in winter, supposedly going to meet Virgil, one of the other teachers, to run away with him.  When she never arrived, he figured she'd changed her mind and left without her.  Only after he arrived in Europe and sent some paintings to the school for her did anyone realize she had not left with him and started to look for her.  When Meg starts talking to her students, some casually mention that they don't believe that Lily's death was an accident.  Some think Virgil killed her, and some think Vera did.  Either way, those comments combined with Vera's papers that Meg is sifting through and Lily's journal that she found hidden in her house, make Meg start to think that maybe Lily didn't die accidentally.

Through reading the papers and journal and talking to students, teachers, and town residents, Meg learns more than she thought she would about both Vera and Lily.  She learns about the baby that Lily had and Vera never knew about, and where that child is now.  She learns more about the night Lily died, and who may have been at fault.  But then she learns more information that will make her question what she thought she knew about the baby and Lily's death.

When I first started this book, I didn't realize it was going to be a mystery.  After I was done, I still wouldn't classify it as a mystery.  I would say it's a wonderful story with a mystery mixed in.  I really enjoyed the book, and when I got to the last 100 or so pages, I didn't want to stop reading.  (That was a bad thing because I hit that point about ten minutes before my lunch break was over.)  This was a very well written book and you should probably read it.