2018,  Book Reviews,  Fiction

Book Review- The Water Cure

19 July 2018 /

Title: The Water Cure
Author: Sophie Mackintosh
Published: 31st May 2018
Pages: 240
Genre: Fiction, Dystopian


Rating: 2.5/5

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. -Goodreads

My thanks to Net Galley and Penguin Books UK for the review
copy.

This is one of those novels where the blurb does not give
you a particularly in depth or detailed description of what the novel contains.
Admittedly I was drawn in by the similarities that were mentioned between The
Handmaid’s Tale and The Virgin Suicides and I thought it seemed like something
different to what I normally read, and I love The Handmaid’s Tale so I had
quite high hopes.
Honestly I just don’t think this novel was for me. I’ve seen
many others have really enjoyed it; both other bloggers, and people I speak to
in work. It just didn’t work for me!
The plot had quite a few holes in it, I understand that
there is an air of mystery around the novel, as we are not sure what has happened
to the world, and we are just not sure what is true. However, there just was
too much confusion around too many things for me to really get a grip on the
novel, Even at the end of the novel nothing was much clearer, and honestly I
questioned why I had bothered reading the novel at all, as I ended with more
questions and confusion than I started with.
The novel is narrated in turn by the three sisters, although
Lia does the most narrating. I quite liked how unreliable all the narrators
were, and how quite often what they had said would be contradicted or
completely falsified by what a sister said in the next chapter. However, the
unreliability became wearing when nothing was ever clarified or explained at
all.
Unfortunately I also found the novel to be quite
predictable. As soon as the men turned up, things went almost exactly as I
thought they might, and that was quite disappointing. I wanted more tension and
more twists and turns, which would have helped elevate what is quite a dark and
sombre novel into something more.

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