Drawdown

Ten friends. Four families. One last August on Lake Martin, and a lake about to be lowered to show what it has been holding all summer.

For eighteen summers, four families have come to Lake Martin and gone home a little more tangled in one another's lives. The Pattersons arrive from Montgomery with a name that opens doors. The St. Clairs come up from Birmingham with newer money and faster boats. The Caldwells have kept the marina longer than anyone can remember. The Gallaghers, artists from somewhere else, found the quiet end of the lake and stayed.

Their ten children grew up as one thing, from dock to pontoon to bonfire. This is the last August they will be that thing. By fall, college and family expectation will pull them in ten directions, and nobody on the water is quite ready to say so.

Drawdown is told by a narrator who sounds like the lake itself: ancient, observant, forgiving, and deeply fond of every one of them. It moves between this final week and the summers behind it, and it knows what they do not yet know. Every winter the lake is lowered, and the shoreline gives up what summer hides. Over one last week, ten young people are lowered too, down to what is true.

It is a book about friendship, first love, and the families that make us and the ones we choose, as soft as worn velvet and as honest as red clay.