LOST GIRLS OF HOLLOW LAKE

Eight girls sneaked away from their high school field trip. Five came back—and one is telling her story.

Eighteen-year-old Evie Williams is supposed to leave her small Pacific Northwest town of Shady Cove for college in Seattle, but events from her recent past keep haunting her, her friends, and other townies. Three months earlier, Evie and some of her classmates left their Hollow Lake National Park campgrounds to explore Dead Refuge Island. Some say the island is “nothing but myth and legend”; no one has ever been able to photograph it, and everyone who sets out to find it disappears or dies. The story unfolds through these alternating timelines (both told in Evie’s first-person present-tense narration). Shades of I Know What You Did Last Summer and Yellowjackets come through as the current-day girls and other locals (as well as Evie’s beloved dog, Tiger) are stalked by a mysterious knife-wielding killer, while, in the earlier timeline, the girls struggle to survive and to escape an island that seems to be demanding a sacrifice. Short sentences and breathless declarations try to evoke an aura of suspense and melodrama, but the Mad Woman, a haunting wooden figure that floats menacingly around the island, goes underexplored. The romance between Evie (the white daughter of a sheriff) and fellow survivor Sunny Park (a bisexual Korean American cheerleader) feels tacked-on. Ultimately, the thin worldbuilding and character development limit the story’s deeper emotional stakes.

Atmospheric but not compelling.