Lake News is ultimately the story of how different types of communities treat an individual linked to scandal. Lily finds little real support among friends and neighbors in the big city of Boston, and yet is welcomed almost with open arms by the closeknit small town where she had ironically spent a painful, ostracized childhood.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's nineteenth-century classic, The Scarlet Letter, also concerns what happens to a woman tainted by sexual scandal played out in public, and how a community may react. Both Lily Blake and Hester Prynne suffer from social opprobrium, enduring stares, scathing criticism, and unwanted notoriety. While Hawthorne's heroine has indeed been guilty of sexual impropriety with a man of the cloth (although the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale's own part in the adultery remains hidden from public knowledge for many years), Delinsky's is accused of an affair that never happened, and yet finds...