The Waters
2023
First Published
3.47
Average Rating
400
Number of Pages
A master of rural noir returns with a fierce, mesmerizing novel about exceptional women and the soul of a small town. On an island in the Great Massasauga Swamp―an area known as “The Waters” to the residents of nearby Whiteheart, Michigan―herbalist Hermine “Herself” Zook has healed the local women of their ailments for generations. As stubborn as her tonics are powerful, Herself inspires reverence and fear in the people of Whiteheart, and even in her own three daughters. The youngest, beautiful and inscrutable Rose Thorn, has left her own daughter, eleven-year-old Dorothy “Donkey” Zook, to grow up wild. Donkey spends her days searching for truths in the lush landscape and in her math books, waiting for her wayward mother and longing for a father, unaware that family secrets, passionate love, and violent men will flood through the swamp and upend her idyllic childhood. With a “ruthless and precise eye for the details of the physical world” ( New York Times Book Review ), Bonnie Jo Campbell presents an elegant antidote to the dark side of masculinity, celebrating the resilience of nature and the brutality and sweetness of rural life.
Avg Rating
3.47
Number of Ratings
9,428
5 STARS
18%
4 STARS
33%
3 STARS
32%
2 STARS
12%
1 STARS
5%
goodreads
Author
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Author · 7 books
Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of the National Book Award finalist American Salvage, Women & Other Animals, and the novels Q Road and Once Upon a River. She is the winner of a Pushcart Prize, the AWP Award for Short Fiction, and Southern Review’s 2008 Eudora Welty Prize for “The Inventor, 1972,” which is included in American Salvage. Her work has appeared in Southern Review, Kenyon Review, and Ontario Review. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she studies kobudo, the art of Okinawan weapons, and hangs out with her two donkeys, Jack and Don Quixote.
