Teaser Tuesday: The Water Cure

I am not generally keen on dystopian fiction, particularly after this past year we have (and continue) to endure, but I finally picked up Sophie Macintosh's The Water Cure and must say I am really engrossed in the story.  Maybe it is the mysterious aspect about it, not quite knowing what is going on and wondering what everything means that has drawn me in.  Maybe it is the feminist slant.  Or that this fictional world does not seem so very different than our world, at least not so far.  

I'm nearly a third of the way into the story.  Into this strange, isolated world of one small family, three daughters and their mother--King, their father having disappeared. arrives two men and a boy.  They have washed ashore on this island and promise more are to follow.  This is a strange world, stranger maybe than the world beyond their shores.  There are only hints of what has become of the wider world, and why these men have left it.

King is known farther abroad and hence the arrival of these three.  His wife mourns him, but I am not so sure the daughters do.  There is something odd about these women, almost cult-like.  I share a few passages to help set the tone.  The story is narrated by the elder two daughter singly or by all three together (maybe the chorus of sorts?).

"There is barbed wire in the forest, deeper than I dare to go.  Should anyone arrive on the island, it serves the same purpose as the buoys out in the bay, marking our a clear message.  Do not enter.  Viewed from another angle, Do not leave."

***

"After years of them, I am used to sudden awakenings, to Mother's hand clamped against my mouth.  Always a drill for some unspecified event, the worst ever yet to come, always her dank breath and the white space of her eyes, blinking too fast."

***

"We have never been permitted to cry because it makes our energies suffocating.  Crying lays you low and vulnerable, racks your body.  If water is the cure for what ails us, the water that comes from our own faces and hearts is the wrong sort.  It has absorbed our pain and is dangerous to let loose.  Pathological despair was King's way of describing an emergency that needed cloth, confinement, our heads heal underwater."

There are other strange cures, or "methods" to keep the daughters "safe."  The peeks at this world is definitely unsettling, but I have more questions than answers so far.  I have to see what all this means and where these stories of these girls, is going.

I may have to look for more books with dystopian slant now that I have had a taste.  Finally, after a very long wait (I think I got in line when the book first came out!) I have heard that Macintosh's second novel, The Blue Ticket is on the hold shelf for me at the library.

Have you read a book similar that you can recommend?  I am curious now.  The only other recent dystopian novel I have read is Station Eleven by Emily Mandel St. John, which was a favorite book the year I read it!

Comments

[Smithereens]

I love Station Eleven a lot too, but i'm always stressed out when reading dystopian novels. I would recommend The Children of men by P.D. James (in a genre I wholly didn't expect from her) and one I got on Netgalley a while back:The End We Start From by Megan Hunter. Also, have you read the Testaments? I plan to this year, I'm late to join the bandwagon but I want to finish S1 of the TV series first.

[Kathy A Johnson]

I generally avoid dystopian fiction, especially lately when the real world has been Too Much, so I can't think of anything to recommend. This book does sound intriguing. I wonder what your final verdict will be?

[LindaY]

I'd like to hear the spoilers of how the book came out, but I don't read dystopian novels. I have bad enough nightmares from the real world.

[BuriedInPrint]

I second the recommendation of Children of Men, but it might be a little slower than this one you've just finished (in the same way that P.D. James' mysteries can take a little more attention too). And I just finished Louise Erdrich's Future of the Living God last night. It was much more about the story of a young woman whose pregnancy leads her to questions about adoption and mothering (about half) and then becomes about how those concerns alter, when the reality of living in the crest of a climate crisis settles in (i.e. affecting how many people can/cannot give birth). I'd thought it was more about society, but it was really more about her story, and I liked that. (I like the other too, but this suited my mood right now.)

[Terra]

I will look for this novel, I read one or two dystopian novels each year and enjoyed Station Eleven. Another I enjoyed was called Dog Star (I think) by Heller.