The Monsters of Templeton

The Monsters of Templeton ~ Lauren Groff

The corpse of a 50-foot underwater creature surfaces from Lake Glimmerglass. Like Nessie, there were stories about a monster in the lake, but no one really believed them before now.

Willie Upton returns to her home in Templeton, New York, to her mother’s home near the lake shore. Willie has had a rough time of it lately. She’s a Stanford graduate student who is pregnant with the child of one of her (married) professors, whose wife she tried to run over with a prop plane in Alaska.

Willie’s mother, Vi, drops a bombshell on her. Willie has been told her entire life that she was the product of Vi’s hippy commune life in the early 1970s in San Francisco, and she’s not exactly sure who her father might be. But Vi now tells her that no, Vi knows who Willie’s father is, he’s not from San Francisco, he lives in Templeton. He has no idea that Willie is his daughter. When Vi won’t tell Willie who her father is, Willie starts out trying to unravel the mystery, and along with it some other mysteries about her town.

This is Groff’s first novel, published in 2008. I’ve read several of her books, most recently The Vaster Wilds, and find them to be so different from one another and all very engaging and wonderful. I think this is my least favorite, but I still enjoyed the time I spent with Willie and the small town inhabitants of Templeton.