Fox Hill, Maine as described by Lucy Webster
Fox Hill, Maine is the perfect summer vacation spot. The lake sparkles. I swear the sunshine feels more golden here. And I wish nobody had ever heard of it.
With just over a thousand year-round residents, it’s supposed to be a tiny town. Instead, legions of summer people flock to their lake houses every year. They’re not bad people — my dad was one of them. But they’ll never really love this place as much as I do.
Close your eyes for a moment and imagine the sound of birds chirping over a trickling creek. Smell the five o’clock barbecue smoke and acres of freshly cut grass. See the soft brown dirt roads winding through thickets of pine. (Did you know Maine is the most forested state in the country? We have one and half million people and 24 billion trees.)
In the summers, it’s lush. Outrageously green. In the winters, when the old colonials and cozy cabins are draped with snow, it’s like a Christmas movie. The radio has more static than channels, and the busiest intersection in town doesn’t even have a stop light. There are no boutiques or impossible-to-get-into restaurants — instead, there’s just one place to eat and you better like chicken wings. My friend Caleb bartends there.
The town’s jewel, of course, is Fox Hill Lake. By late July, it’s as warm as bath water. Clear, too. I like curling up on our little motorboat with a good book on a bright blue afternoon, but the best time of the day is sunset. My dad and I used to watch them every night, analyzing them the way other families are into football. We tracked sundown times and weather reports, made predictions about how the colors and cloud formations would evolve over the course of an evening, and admired the loons. I’d do anything to have just one more night with him here.
My grandparents bought our house when my dad was a kid, and I’ve never seen anything else like it. It’s post-and-beam style with triple-height windows. The stone chimney was built with rocks pulled right from the lake. Most of the furniture is from the Vietnam War, and the rest of the appliances aren’t much newer. In the living room, there’s a sprawling red Persian rug, a stack of hand-chopped logs by the fireplace, and baseball hats hanging from wooden pegs so you can grab one on your way outside. Don’t look too closely at the box of VHS tapes under the TV. Nobody’s dusted here lately.
It was quiet enough here for years, but then Airbnb took off. Suddenly, every Masshole wanted to rent and buy places. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to afford buying my own house here — which is devastating, because my half-sister is dead set on selling our dad’s place. This might be my last summer on Fox Hill Lake. I’ll miss it terribly.
From beloved author Hannah Orenstein, this love letter to lake life is “the Parent Trap for adults,” the story of two half-sisters who meet for the first time at their father’s cabin in Maine after his unexpected death.
Every summer, Vivian Levy and Lucy Webster spend a month with their father at his lake house — separately. Raised in New York City, Vivian is an ambitious sommelier with a secret that could derail her future. Lucy grew up in a tiny Maine town, where she now teaches high school English while watching her marriage unravel. They’ve never met. While Lucy envied her half-sister from afar, their father kept Vivian in the dark.
When Vivian arrives at the lake to spread his ashes and sell his cabin, she's shocked to find Lucy there, awaiting his return. In an ideal world, they’d help each other through their grief. Instead, forced to spend the summer together, they fight through a storm of suspicion and hostility to untangle the messy truth about their parents’ pasts. While Lucy is desperate to hold onto the house, Vivian is scrambling after a betrayal. After thirty years apart, is it too late for them to be a family?
For fans of Carley Fortune and Elin Hilderbrand, this sister story set on a lush lake brims with the undeniable heart, depth, charm, and humor that have endeared Hannah Orenstein to legions of readers.
Women's Fiction Friendship [Dutton, On Sale: May 13, 2025, Trade Paperback / e-Book , ISBN: 9780593851555 / eISBN: 9780593851562]
Hannah Orenstein is a writer and editor in New York. She's the dating editor at Elite Daily. Previously, she was a writer at Seventeen.com. At twenty-one, she became the youngest matchmaker at an elite dating service. She was born and raised in Boston, studied journalism and history at NYU, and lives in Manhattan with her fat cat, Eloise.
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