2018 School Spending Survey Report
The Water Cure
Doubleday. Jan. 2019. 288p. ISBN 9780385543873. $25.95; ebk. ISBN 9780385543880. F
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DEBUT This first novel from award-winning short story writer Mackintosh is set on the edge of a postapocalyptic world. Three sisters, Grace, Lia, and Sky, live in a moldering spa hotel with their mother and a father called King. The parents have kept the young women isolated from the mainland, where environmental toxicity and gender wars have ravaged the female population; Grace's pregnancy can only be the result of incest. The hotel somehow has running water and a pool, and the girls languish in shabby luxury. Occasionally, damaged women arrive on the shore, and the mother gives them a water cure, which involves salt water purges and muslin wraps. The tension ratchets up when King fails to return from a trip to the mainland for provisions, and their insulated women's world is violated when two men and a boy wash up on the beach.
VERDICT This image-laden and lyrical first novel, its short chapters interspersed with brief, disturbing messages from women from the mainland, imagines a societal breakdown that has inflicted most of its harm on women, which seems both frightening and inevitable, offering a dark, extended metaphor on toxic male/female relations. [See Prepub Alert, 7/9/18.]
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