The Water Cure: A Novel

I believe reviews are better left without a readers narrative of the plot and meaning. I am a fan of dystopian fiction which is why after hearing a brief review of the book on NPR, I ordered it and read it cover to cover in about a day. Stunningly beautifully written, it did not disappoint and I highly recommend it. It has a strong feminist flavor and is not for those who prefer a formulaic plot line. It's like wandering through a hazy, fascinating, but sometimes brutal dream.

Incredibly boring nonsense. It’s hard to tell which of the sisters is narrating, because only their superficial characteristics distinguish them - one is significantly younger, one is pregnant. And one is neither the youngest nor pregnant. There is virtually no dialogue, so you get no realer sense of how they interact except through descriptions of their weird, ritual directed life. It’s just terrible. Oh, and there is no twist near the end that pulls anything together - I kept waiting for that. Nope. It stays boring and weird the whole way through.

“The Water Cure”, by Sophie Mackintosh, is chilling, creepy, frustrating, and profoundly disturbing. Mackintosh has created a dystopian setting, an isolated family of three daughters, Grace, Lia, and Sky. They are being “protected” from toxins on the mainland, but there are also being mentally and physically abused by their parents. I won’t reveal the plot because it’s meant for the reader to figure things out. Sort of. Though, it’s not a spoiler to say that the novel intends to be a “feminist” tale about what it means to be female, siblings, patriarchy, nature verses nurture, and the fragility of civilization.However, generalizations about “all men” are just as untrue and sexist as generalizations about “all women” and true feminism should not seek to construct an “us or them” paradigm of male: evil/female: victim. Needless to say, there is no male point of view here, and I never connected with the sister’s characters enough to care about them; ultimately the novel failed for me.I highly recommend: “The Natural Way of Things” by Charlotte Wood, which deals with similar issues and ideas.

I could not make heads or tails out of this narrative. The further I got into the book, the less I cared. I believe the writer has some responsibility to provide the reader with a clue. All I can say at this point is I don't know how the author struggled through the process of writing this novel. It must be difficult to maintain that level of vagueness all the way till the end. I kept waiting for the story to come into focus. I returned the book for a full refund.

Unfortunately, the writing just wasn't there to make me care about even one of the characters. The plot seemed to be made up of one intriguing idea (a future where all men are toxic to all women) but then there was no back story as to how it began, what the first symptoms were, or how this "family" managed to have a man with them that did not make them sick enough to die. And then there were the 3 visitors who showed up. About halfway through, I was still so ambivalent about the characters that I was hoping for an amazing twist at the end and kept reading. There was one plot twist but, for the life of me, I couldn't actually figure out which one of the girls was involved. They all spoke with the same voice! Ugh. Finished the book 20 minutes ago and couldn't wait to see if it was just me or if others had the same problems with this story. I really did want to love it.

It's clear from the beginning that this novel takes a lot of inspiration from The Handmaid's Tale, yet still manages to exist as it's own vivid and fully formed work. Of course, this is very much a feminist text of which the overall message is essentially that the patriarchy has manufactured the societal belief that women need men to take care of them. Throughout the progress of the story the reader is introduced to a series of interesting metaphors to communicate this idea. Definitely worth a read if you are into feminism and/or allegorical science fiction.The ending might be divisive even among feminists. It could be interpreted as empowering, but it also may be taken as radical/militant. I personally fell somewhere in between. However, being a man, I'm probably the wrong person to make that call.

With a referral by Margaret Atwood I was really hoping for something much better. I got through it because it is well written, but I was not engaged with the story and finished really disappointed.

Elevator pitch would be: Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" meets "The Shining," the Salem witch trials and "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." And the edges of "Lord of the Flies." And "Angels and Insects."Husband and wife, three daughters, in white flowing clothes and carrying purifying salt in their hands, are isolated on an island to protect the women from a deadly plague carried by men. New Age survivalism has moved the group from family to cult with shifting rituals involving salt, iron, water, muslin, near-drowning, bonfires and the abuse of small animals.Women suffering from the male-transmitted plague once made their way to this slowly collapsing resort to be cured. Why did the flow of women stop? Where did the stream of women go? (More practically, where does the hot and cold running water come from? How is the pool beautifully maintained?)King disappears. And two men and a boy wash up on the beach. They either bring contagion with them or awaken it in the girls. In one week of alternating blinding hot glare and pouring rain, it all goes to hell.

I’m afraid this was just too deep and vague for me. I usually enjoy novels that require a bit of a cerebral workout, but this was like being on a slow train to nowhere on a foggy day: gloomy, uninspiring and uneventful.The narrative - if you can call it that - is so dense, it might as well have been written in code. A family of five—mother, father, three daughters—living in an abandoned hotel on an island in what seems to be some kind of dystopian future. All kinds of unknown dangers lurk beyond the strictly defined boundaries. Society is poisonous, men evil. The girls are forced to endure strange rituals and cruel therapies. Only the father, ‘King’, has any contact with the outside world, bringing back provisions and fearful tales. So, when he mysteriously disappears ...Okay, so there is a story of sorts, but so much is left unsaid and unexplained, I struggled to make any sense of it. And as for the three sisters: in spite of the trials they suffer, I found it hard to engage emotionally with them. As characters, they were just too nebulous. The ending provides some hint of resolution to the mystery, but it’s very much a guessing game. I’m all for imagery, symbolism and allusion in literary fiction, but there really is no point in trying to be too clever.I find it telling that critics have used words like ‘luminous’ and ‘haunting’ to describe this strange novel. My guess is they didn’t understand it either.Thanks for reading my review. I hope you found it helpful. You can find more candid book reviews on my Amazon profile page.

This book was a rather disappointing read and I almost gave up at a couple of points. We follow three sisters who have been raised in a women's cult, isolated from the world and taught to fear outsiders (mainly men) for fear of contamination. The sisters were not well developed as characters and lacked depth and complexity, which made it very difficult to care what happened to them. My biggest problem with this book however is how it depicts men. All the men in the story are either murderers or seducers and the women are the victims of this. Of course the story is told from the multiple perspectives of the sisters so you could argue this is a point of view but the book does nothing to challenge that assumption and actually seems to enforce it. I am surprised to see this book described as a feminist text as, in my opinion, it does women no favours at all and fails to show how women can be empowered without it being to the detriment of men.

I was going to take a few days to really think this book over before I posted this review but then I decided against that notion. It’s always best to get your thoughts written (or typed) down whilst they are still fresh in your mind – so here goes. It is always easy to brand something as ‘feminist’ and you know automatically that you have grasped the attention of many eager readers. Throw in ‘dystopian’, and the audience widens. But I didn’t see this book as a ‘feminist dystopian’ literature at all. It was so different to anything I have ever read before, in a good way. Yes, the three sisters show unity and courage at the end but before they were seen as ‘heroines’ in my eyes I saw them as the complete opposite. We follow the lives of three sisters, who live on an island with their parents. Apparently being protected from ‘the man’ who can cause their bodies and health harm BUT that’s where the explanation ended. What they are being protected from and what is out beyond the sea, obviously isn’t quite right, but there isn’t a deep explanation, it was all very vague. Was it purposefully done like this? To gain ‘trust’ from the reader to what may have happened? I would have preferred a little more detail to be honest. However, the authors style of writing was breathtakingly beautiful. Her writing flows with such fluidity that you almost get lost in her words - A kind of Kafkaesque type of poetic literature. The metaphors to the sea and water are introduced in every chapter and glides with such ease. Beautifully done. The short chapters told from the perspective of each sister was a great way to understand the characters personally. Very different to anything I have read before. But change is good. 🌟🌟🌟🌟 Zubs 💛💋

At first I didn't think I would enjoy this book, the style unfamiliar and original, but I was soon wrong. The whistful and secretive energy of the sister's world really wraps around this book, and entices you to read more, though you're not sure why. It soon picks up, and the wait is worth it to learn all the juicy secrets and mourn for their fates, honestly I loved it, in a way I didn't think I would. Its original, it's though provoking and it scares me to think that Mackintosh may have been writing from her own inner monologue on men, but I loved it and I highly recommend it. Its an oddly easy read, and feels calm, like the summer haze you always dream about but in some strange, distantly alarming way

On the face of it this is a book about some kind of post apocalypse world where disease and contamination have infected the earth. A family of man, woman and three daughters have established a safe zone on what seems to be a tropical island. There, they perform cleansing rituals and training exercises to keep them healthy and prepare them for when their stronghold might be breached by outsiders.But occasionally the man sails to the mainland for supplies, so it can’t be that dangerous. And one of the daughters is pregnant, her father the only possible culprit. The woman teases and torments her daughters. It is not too much to say that she bullies and emotionally abuses them. Suddenly this Shangri-la seems like less of a refuge and more of a prison. One of the girls in particular is so desperate for affection that she is self harming.Then the man disappears and three strangers arrive on the island.One of the brilliant - and also the most frustrating things - about this book was the perpetual sense of uncertainty. I just wasn’t sure of what was really going on, what the truth was, who to trust. I am afraid that even having read it all I am still not sure. But perhaps that isn’t the point of this book. It isn’t really about the future. It is about how love can be - must be? - cruel sometimes, about how loyalty has betrayal wrapped up in it, about difficult choices and how the strongest human spirit can inhabit the weakest human frame.