Review: Rumrunners, Lighthouses, and Duty
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 03 19, 2013
Set in 1924 during the Prohibition era, this story has rumrunners, gangsters with Tommy guns, a dedicated lighthouse keeper, and a pair of 16 year olds, but the real star of the show is Lake Superior and the brutal storms that rush across it often with little warning. There's also a old love triangle that involves three former best friends: the lighthouse keeper, his wife, and her old love, Jean LeBeck, who just happens to be the leader of the rumrunners.The book was not well-marked as one meant for teens and young adults, but it became clear that was the target audience for the book when the two teenagers became the focus of much of the action. There is also an underlying message threading throughout the book that teaches that duty and dedication that seems to be well suited for that audience.The story itself started out well but towards the latter half of the book began to drag. The night that the gangsters invade the island and lighthouse compound especially seems never-ending as there are cross country treks, boat races, gun fights, beatings, and bad weather piling on one after another. After awhile it becomes rather tedious, and I found myself wishing they'd just get it over with. Beyond all that there is no way these people could have taken multiple dunkings into Lake Superior in November and continued to function. Hypothermia was mentioned in passing once, but it seems that even though soaked to the skin and shivering you can still hike across country for an hour or more during a horrible storm and live to tell of it.There was a huge continuity error that haunted me through most of the book. The main action occurred in 1924 and it was stated several times that the lighthouse keeper's son, Ian, was 16 years old. Yet his mother was receiving love letters from LeBeck while he was on the French front in World War I in 1918 asking her to wait for him so they could marry. By my arithmetic, Ian should have already been 10 years old in 1918 and his parents long married by then. But their best friend LeBeck didn't know the two were already married and had a child? Had they been out of contact for over a decade yet he was still expecting her to be waiting for him? I was half expecting a reveal at the end that Ian was actually LeBeck's child, but it never went there. Since so much space was taken up with LeBeck's letters from France during the war it seemed to be an important story point yet only served to muddy the timeline and relationship of the three characters.In short, the target teen/young adult audience may like this book for the action and adventure and the teen heroes. Older audiences probably would enjoy it for the historical aspects of the story, but find it dragging by mid-book.