The setting is an exclusive girl’s school, set next to an icy lake in upstate New York, beset by a string of student suicides. Or are they? And how is it that pages of the new Latin teacher’s student journal, written and lost during her senior year, suddenly starting to show up? Wait, now, this is sounding familiar. Didn’t I just read this?
Checking back through my goodreads list, I realize that I am thinking of Arcadia Falls, and it’s by the same author! But Arcadia Falls was written eight years after this one, and instead of some vaguely Wiccan goings-on, the current book features some pretty twisted inter-familial relationships in the advanced Latin student population. And they are staging Iphigenia on the lake, as one does, and reading Antigone in class. But wait, aren’t those Greek plays? And do those texts exist in Latin? Some of us worry about such things.
Both books feature multi-generational teacher/student connections though, and there probably are not enough books written about dubiously artistic female prep schools, especially those next to killer lakes. I’m going to give the nod to Arcadia Falls though as being a little more tightly written, and more believable in the connections between the characters. But The Lake of Dead Languages is a good time as well. I must say, as a former high school teacher myself, I rather like the title Domina. You don’t get cool titles in math.