Imagine a world very close to our own: where women are not safe in their bodies, where desperate measures are required to raise a daughter. This is the story of Grace, Lia, and Sky kept apart from the world for their own good and taught the terrible things that every woman must learn about love. And it is the story of the men who come to find them - three strangers washed up by the sea, their gazes hungry and insistent, trailing desire and destruction in their wake.
Hypnotic and compulsive, The Water Cure is a fever dream, a blazing vision of suffering, sisterhood, and transformation.
I think my main problem with this book is that I expected something very different based on that intentionally vague synopsis. It's not that it's a deliberately misleading summary, it's that my expectations were just sent in a different direction and I think that affected, rightly or wrongly, the way I feel about the book.
So the book begins exceptionally well with the disappearance and assumed death of Grace, Lia and Sky's father, King, the only man any of them have ever been around. He left for the mainland to gather supplies and hasn't come back. The family, three daughters and their mother, live in isolation on an island, in a crumbling house, safe from the toxic mainland and the predatory men that populate it. Women used to come to the island to be cured, to be cleansed of their experiences using a variety of home-developed treatments. They don't come any more. There have been no strangers on the island in a long time.
I loved the hazy, ethereal, endless summer vibe of the prose. The languid language, the vagueness. As the reader, your suspicions are heightened fairly early on, purely by how dreamy and unreal everything seems. I was not sure if these narrators were unreliable, or if they really believed they were speaking their truth. The narrative switches between two of the sisters but to be honest, it's very difficult to notice any difference in who's speaking. Perhaps this is the dual narrator format not working out, perhaps they have been fed the same opinions and values to the extent that they are largely indistinguishable. The novel seems to settle into Lia as the main narrator after a while. The sisters have been encouraged to give and withhold love as a means of control and I guess as a type of psychological torture. Everything the sisters partake in seems to be considered a Therapy...lots of importance is placed on water and salt. I wondered if they were the survivors of some sort of apocalypse or the leftover members of some kind of cult. The answer is much less interesting.
I know deception is a main theme of the novel (along with survival, sisterhood, truth etc) but as things started to become a bit clearer, the whole thing sort of fell apart for me. I had been suspicious of the lack of world building, and was disappointed with the direction the story went in. As soon as the (male) strangers turn up, you can pretty accurately predict what happens next. Any remaining interest in the story and its conclusion dries up as the narrative limps towards its end. I know there will be readers that love this, and that will argue that everything is done deliberately to highlight the ridiculousness of certain types of feminism, for extreme worldviews lacking in nuance , the infinite corruptibility of humans and the many ways in which the naïve will be taken advantage of and molded into a new shape. It just didn't really do anything for me at all. I struggled to find much to hold on to in the narrative, even after more information came to light I still found it hard to feel much of anything for any of these characters. In a book as detached and as Othering as the Water Cure, perhaps that is the take away experience that was intended. However, it leaves me not particularly inclined to reread, to recommend or even to think about once that last page is over with.
*spoilers*
The writing really was excellent- claustrophobic, oppressive, languid and threatening, but I just really did not think much at all to the story, which, ultimately is about a man and his wife abusing their daughters away from the eyes of society.
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