Lakelore

Overview

Lakelore follows Bastián Silvano and Lore Garcia, two teenagers tied together by a place few others know exists: a submerged, dreamlike world said to exist in the space between air and water, somewhere beneath the lake their town grew up beside. Bastián has moved between that hidden realm and ordinary life for as long as he can remember. Lore crossed into it only once, years ago, but the experience reshaped the course of their life.

When the boundary separating the underwater world from the surface starts to give way, long-buried memories and secrets threaten to spill out along with it. Bastián and Lore, who have not spoken in seven years, find themselves forced back into each other's orbit. Stopping the two worlds from colliding means putting old silence aside and risking the vulnerability of being known.

McLemore builds the novel around that tension between concealment and connection, letting the fantasy premise mirror the more intimate work the characters are doing: deciding what parts of themselves they are willing to surface.

A Story of Thresholds and Return

Much of McLemore's body of work lives at the border between the magical and the real, and Lakelore continues that preoccupation with liminal space, quite literally staging it as a world that is half-air and half-water, neither fully one thing nor the other. That in-between quality extends to the protagonists themselves, both of whom are non-binary, and to the structure of the plot, which hinges on a long-dormant friendship resurfacing rather than a new one forming.

The novel also engages with how people manage disclosure: what they choose to keep submerged, who they let into the hidden parts of their lives, and what it costs to keep a secret for years versus what it costs to finally share one. Reuniting Bastián and Lore after their long estrangement gives the magical crisis a human stake, since repairing the rift between the two worlds is inseparable from repairing the rift between the two of them.

Why Lakelore Has Been Challenged

Gender identity is the throughline in objections raised against this book. Because both central characters are non-binary and their experiences inform how the story treats memory, trust, and self-disclosure, some challengers have characterized that representation as content inappropriate for young readers or as material promoting ideas they object to for students in school settings. These concerns are typically framed around the presence of non-binary characters and identity themes rather than around any graphic content in the narrative. According to the records tracked in this catalog, Lakelore has been challenged in 2 states and 2 districts.