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    Lakewood: A Novel
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    Lakewood: A Novel
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    Lakewood: A Novel
    Ebook271 pages4 hours

    Lakewood: A Novel

    By Megan Giddings

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    NPR Book of the Year 2020

    Electric Literature: One of 55 Books by Women and Nonbinary Writers of Color to Read in 2020 |  Lit Hub & The Millions: Most Anticipated Books of 2020 | Ms. Magazine: Anticipated 2020 Feminist Books | Refinery29: Books by Black Women We are Looking Forward To Reading | One of The Millions’ Most Anticipated Reads of 2020 | Amazon Book of the Month Pick | Audible Editor’s Pick | Essence’s Pick| Glamour’s Must Read | Ms. Magazine’s Anticipated Read of 2020 

    A startling debut about class and race, Lakewood evokes a terrifying world of medical experimentation—part The Handmaid’s Tale, part The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

    When Lena Johnson’s beloved grandmother dies, and the full extent of the family debt is revealed, the black millennial drops out of college to support her family and takes a job in the mysterious and remote town of Lakewood, Michigan.

    On paper, her new job is too good to be true. High paying. No out of pocket medical expenses. A free place to live. All Lena has to do is participate in a secret program—and lie to her friends and family about the research being done in Lakewood. An eye drop that makes brown eyes blue, a medication that could be a cure for dementia, golden pills promised to make all bad thoughts go away.

    The discoveries made in Lakewood, Lena is told, will change the world—but the consequences for the subjects involved could be devastating. As the truths of the program reveal themselves, Lena learns how much she’s willing to sacrifice for the sake of her family.

    Provocative and thrilling, Lakewood is a breathtaking novel that takes an unflinching look at the moral dilemmas many working-class families face, and the horror that has been forced on black bodies in the name of science.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMar 24, 2020
    ISBN9780062913227
    Author

    Megan Giddings

    Megan Giddings is an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota. Her first novel, Lakewood, was one of New York Magazine's top ten books of 2020, an NPR Best Book of 2020, a Michigan Notable book for 2021, a finalist for two NAACP Image Awards, and was a finalist for an L.A. Times Book Prize in the Ray Bradbury Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative category. Megan's writing has received funding and support from the Barbara Deming Foundation and Hedgebrook. She lives in the Midwest.

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    Reviews for Lakewood

    3.5/5

    146 ratings10 reviews

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    • 4/5
      An interesting journey into the heart of a government experiment in a sleepy lakeside town. Our protagonist is well developed and hearing about her grandmother was heart warming. This doesn’t make my favorite books’ list but was an enjoyable read.
    • 3/5
      This book was okay. It was kind of all over the place with a really unreliable narrator. Granted she's unreliable because of the experimental drugs she's being given, but still. I found it interesting that by the time she worked up the nerve to go home and tell her mom, the whole experiment had fallen apart. Dr. Lisa was hella weird and hella sketchy! Actually everyone there was. The friend group was nice but they were very superficial characters with little to no development. By the time I got to the last 50 pages or so I didn't even care anymore and just wanted to get to the end. Speaking of the ending ... it was rather anticlimactic and a bit of a let down.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this . Would have been all five starts except that the ending was a little anticlimactic
    • 5/5
      This is an incredible little novel that made me care so much about the main character and feel so horrified for her as well.. the story is so relevant to our time and I couldn't help but be able to visualize the story as it went along. Kudos to Megan Giddings for creating such a powerful narrative.
    • 4/5

      A fascinating and original plot. If you have some great stories like this one, you can publish it on Novel Star, just submit your story to hardy@novelstar.top or joye@novelstar.top
    • 5/5
      Its def worth a read.Makes you think as well because our government def did these things as well.

    • 4/5
      Earnest and chilling, Lakewood is a cautionary and thought-provoking critique on race and class disguised as body horror but succeeds at both.
    • 4/5
      One of those books that you should understand better but don't. The protagonist is a Black college student who is in a big financial bind and finds rescue by enrolling in a research study with completely disturbing, violent, and abusive components. By joining, Lena gets a large salary and, most importantly, health insurance for herself and for her ailing mother. She stays despite the strange physical and psychological damage, most of which take place in a bland Midwestern town's office park but also, terrifyingly, in an isolated rural cabin. Lena can't tell if the tests and challenges she's undergoing are specifically designed for her as a Black woman, as all Black people suffer under the misbelief that they are able to bear physical pain more readily than other races. The problem is that the reader doesn't know either. There's a bit of a reveal at the end as regards Lena's mother's experiences, and a small public protest against the experimentation, but not many clues beyond that. The novel is a combination of horror story and sociological narrative that left me feeling like I was too dumb to get in on the true story.
    • 4/5
      I think of it now as proof people are realizing governments can be absolutely worthless. The only dependable way to survive today is to put your faith in the power of other people wanting to give you money. Online fundraising. Corporations that still pretend to care what consumers think. They want to be able to say, See, look how benevolent we are, think about this instead of how we're polluting the ocean and not paying our workers enough.

      Lakewood really defies a description; I'm as unsure how to label the novel as I am unsure how I feel about it. It's horror as much as sci-fi. Partially epistolary, a smattering of family secrets. A melding of racist history and racist present. As much medical thriller as speculative fiction. Ultimately I'm not sure whether I truly enjoyed it but I know it was compelling, pulling me along on the ride, and really, isn't that what we really want from a story?

      Lakewood follows Lena Johnson, a young Black university student on the cusp of adulthood pushed headlong into the worst of being an adult. In her desperation to cover the medical debts of her late grandmother's cancer and her mother's mysterious chronic illness, Lena receives a letter promising lots of money for an extended research study. Shit gets weird pretty quick after that, devolving into letters from Lena to her best friend.

      I found Lena to be a solid protagonist. She's smart, compassionate, an art history nerd, average in a lot of her desires and aspirations - to be happy, and healthy, and secure. It's not necessary for me to find every protagonist entirely likable or relatable, but it was easy to connect to Lena, to root for her. The further into the research trial into supposed 'memory improvement' the prose starts match Lena's mindset, dreamy, confusing, switching in and out of thoughts and scenes with no warning. The effect is discombobulating, confusing, I went back and read lines or paragraphs again, wondering at meanings, feeling like I was with Lena on the journey. I like when a story can make me work for it, make me want to work for it.

      There are a lot of layers in Lakewood and this may well be a novel that delivers more upon re-reads.
    • 3/5
      3.5 stars--I wonder if this would have been 4 if I read it on paper/or screen? The narration is totally fine, it is just that I am not the greatest listener, and the sometimes unreliable narrator had me confused more than once.This is one of the books I missed last year due to Covid--it was on my radar, but then whe. it came out the libraries were closed, and I kind of forgot about it. It came up on the Reading Engvy podcast right as I needed a new audiobook on hoopla, and it was there. Perfect timing.This book addresses the US history of running medical experiments on black people, largely without consent (or without informed consent). Many have heard of the Tuskegee studies, but there were others. In this novel, Lena is invited to join a medical study that will pay very, very, very well. She and her mother need the money and insurance, so she drops out of school to go. It is all very hush hush with intense backstories. The pay and insurance is real--the informed consent is not. And to story goes even deeper.I'm not even sure how to classify this novel. Is it speculative fiction? Dystopian? In the past, similar events have occurred--which makes it seem not so speculative. But still dystopian, I guess.