Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Length: 400 pages
Audiobook Length: 14 hours and 40 minutes
First Published: 2024
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Rachael’s Review
Fierce matriarch Herself Zook lives in the Great Massasauga Swamp outside Whiteheart, Michigan, healing the local women with herbs and tonics. When Rose Thorn, the youngest of her three estranged daughters, returns one day, Rose leaves Herself to raise Rose’s daughter, Donkey. Now eleven, the precocious child loves growing up in the wild, until family secrets, love, and violence end her idyllic childhood and divide the entire community.
I generally enjoy the celebrity book club picks, but I found The Waters so tediously boring I could not force my way through it. From the start, the constant superfluous details and long chapters had me worried, but I kept hoping the narrative might save it once it kicked in. Yet, I ended up disliking all of the characters and found myself dreading picking up the story. I rarely DNF but I just was not into this one at all and decided my time would be better spent elsewhere.
Publisher’s Description
A master of rural noir returns with a fierce, mesmerizing novel about exceptional women and the soul of a small town.
On an island in the Great Massasauga Swamp―an area known as “The Waters” to the residents of nearby Whiteheart, Michigan―herbalist and eccentric Hermine “Herself” Zook has healed the local women of their ailments for generations. As stubborn as her tonics are powerful, Herself inspires reverence and fear in the people of Whiteheart, and even in her own three estranged daughters. The youngest―the beautiful, inscrutable, and lazy Rose Thorn―has left her own daughter, eleven-year-old Dorothy “Donkey” Zook, to grow up wild.
Donkey spends her days searching for truths in the lush landscape and in her math books, waiting for her wayward mother and longing for a father, unaware that family secrets, passionate love, and violent men will flood through the swamp and upend her idyllic childhood. Rage simmers below the surface of this divided community, and those on both sides of the divide have closed their doors against the enemy. The only bridge across the waters is Rose Thorn.
About Bonnie Jo Campbell
Bonnie Jo Campbell is an author whose works include American Salvage, Once Upon a River, and The Waters. She currently lives outside Kalamazoo, Michigan. Visit the author’s website →
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