I liked this book a lot more than I expected to! The twisted, insulated world left behind by the King for these four women to perpetuate is chilling.

This was weird and strange and thought provoking and infuriating and beautifully written all at the same time.

I don’t know, man. I’m not sure what to say. This was an effed up story. Super ridiculously disturbing, and also hard to put down. Atmospherically it was perfect, and the author kept the consistency of the “innocence” of her three primary characters the whole way through. I loved how little details were just dropped in which shook what you thought you knew about what was happening.

It is interesting to look at this book in contrast to Naomi Alderman’s The Power. Two completely different points of view on women dealing with theirs.

I didn’t have a lot of interest in reading this, I thought I’d read enough of this type of book, but I have to say I found this a fresh perspective.

The Water Cure is a dystopian novel set on a deserted island where Grace, Lia, and Sky have live with their parents, King and Mother. King and Mother built their utopia away from toxins, abusive men, and corrupt society.

The girls have never been exposed to men (other than their father) but have been exposed to a number of women would seek refuge on the island. These women would come to them as weary broken souls, damaged, and abused by men, their chance to escape the mainland and their circumstance. Like the girls, the women participate in ritualistic “cures” designed to cleanse and strengthen their bodies. The cures include everything from being sewn up in sacks and sitting in a hot sauna until dehydration over takes them, to screaming into muslin, to holding their breath underwater. The ultimate cure involves the consumption of gallons of salt water, but only when the body is ready and worthy. Eventually the women stop coming, although we never quite figure out why.

The novel unfold in three parts with three different narrators. In Part One, King dies and the girls, all three in narration as a collective unit, are left alone with their mother. They grapple with feelings of his death, how they will protect themselves, and survive in this world without the only man they’ve ever known. They are left with only Mother, who periodically drugs them and continues their ritualistic customs (torture) designed to test their devotion, proving love for the sisters outweighs everything else.

At the end of Part One, two men and a boy wash up on shore. Part Two, is narrated by Lia, solely. Lia is the outcast, the lost, unloved, middle child. We learn of Lia’s fears and insecurities, but also of her strengths. In Part Two, the women learn to deal with and live around the men. Their reactions to the men vary from interest, hope, boredom, and total ignoring. Their lives continue even as they orbit the men, or perhaps the men orbit them. Finally, in Part Three, Grace, the eldest, becomes the narrator and begins to piece together different facets of the story. We learn more about King and Mother, the rituals, the women, the cures. It’s short lived, but Grace, who watches and sees everything, gets her time to tell her story. The novel ends with the collective voice of the sisters as the story comes to resolution.

I enjoyed the writing in the novel. The way the author describes the beach, their crumbling paradise home, the languish of boredom on a hot summer day is beautiful. The concept was interesting and I found myself wanting to know what happened next. However, it felt incomplete. There are references to the Women who come seeking asylum, the chapters open with stories from those women, yet it felt like an open story line. I kept trying to place the symbols the girls would call attention to, the ghosts, the boundary, the bird, but never could quite figure out what they meant. And the world, what really is the world like? I finished the book feeling incomplete and somewhat lost. I wished the plot has been more fully developed.

3 Stars
Review by Heather
Late Night Reviewer
Up All Night w/ Books Blog

The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh is touted as “hypnotic and compulsive.” “…a fever dream, blazing vision of suffering, sisterhood, and transformation.” I wish it had lived up to that dramatic description. Ms. Mackintosh is a descriptive writer, but I found the switching of voices to be confusing; all three sisters in one chapter, Grace, then Lia, then all three again, but we never hear directly from Sky. The ambiguousness of the “danger” to women to be distracting and no clear reason given for why the girls’ family felt the need to leave society and create their haven. The Water Cure reads like it wants to be a feminist manifesto, but comes across as misogynistic.

Few of the characters in this book are very likeable from the girls’ cruel parents whose “cures” are really forms of torture; the girls themselves who at the first opportunity taunt and torture a small boy who happens upon the island with his father. And the two men who appeared on the beach with the boy who are selfish and self-serving.

I will say The Water Cure is thought-provoking and an interesting take on an alternative world where women feel so threatened by men they voluntarily segregate themselves. I just wish the author hadn’t left quite so much to the imagination as to why.

**ARC provided for an honest review**

I grow very weary of these Margaret Atwood-esque “feminism” novels that focus on men and their violence against women. This is a story about men with significant power (and a man called “King” nonetheless!) physically and emotionally abusing helpless women for the majority of the time. It’s an indictment on men (which I don’t necessarily disagree with) but that doesn’t automatically make it feminist, does it?

Obviously, this is not a pleasurable read. These women are routinely subjected to needless violence, and it never really makes sense why. That the violence is intended to make the women stronger is the argument of the perpetrators, and it clearly doesn’t, which makes the book feel stagnant. What are the women getting out of this abusive “training”? Nothing, and so is the reader.

One of the main characters ceaselessly pines for an abusive man, and this just drags on for so long that it became painful to read. Her desperation is the result of her emotional trauma, and I get it, but it was so pathetic and annoying that I stopped caring for her character. Was this behavior realistic? Sure. Enjoyable to read? Absolutely not.

Something that I want to explicitly mention (because the book does not) is the danger of women who will collaborate with men to continue the oppression of other women, whether in an attempt to save themselves or to gain favor with men. We see this with Mother—King schemes up this cruel “water cure” system but Mother, going along with it, ultimately takes the blame. Because the cast of this novel is so small and the story takes place in essentially one house, this is presented more as a fault of Mother’s rather than a criticism of the women who conspire to subdue women if it earns them “power.” (Funny how the women of the Trump administration just randomly sprang into my mind here completely unbidden!)

I liked Mackintosh’s writing a lot, honestly, and the way she described the mansion and island was lush and evocative. The story wasn’t fleshed out enough for me, though it did keep my attention. I sped through the novel, interested to see how everything played out. The ending was a let down, because it concluded sort of lazily and in ways that I expected.

This is billed as a “feminist revenge fantasy” which makes me feel a bit iffy because “feminist” and “revenge” are sort of antonyms to me. But I guess that’s only how I personally view feminism.

*LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE*
'Then we are all just useless there on the lawn, already painfully overgrown, waiting for Mother to find us.'

Just what is so terrible out there beyond the territory (island) that King keeps his daughters Grace, Lia, and Sky along with their mother under protection? What sort of men are beyond the waters, dangerous enough that it requires barbed wire? Just what has soured the mainland? Will we ever know?

The girls are cleansed through strange rituals, therapies to cleanse them from the world’s rot, but there is no cleansing for when in mourning. Their father disappeared, and now it is just the women. Is he dead? Missing? What will they do without King, father, protector? What will happen when the threat arrives, in the form of strangers, men?

We know once there were women who sought shelter, but from what? The Water Cure is beautiful and frustrating at the same time. I kept wondering, has the world gone to hell or is this just some brainwashed family, and the men that arrive don’t really confirm much about the world out there. There is a line, “The real trick is how and why we continue surviving at all”, that speaks volumes because really what sort of life do they have? Sister’s only for company, clueless about the world beyond, controlling their personal energies (feelings) in ways the toxic world didn’t ever prepare for, leading to destruction. What are these therapies, to us laughable at best, which lends more to the ‘these women are brainwashed’ theory. “In the heady days without our father, we let our bodies sprawl.” Suddenly their days and bodily toxins are less measured with King gone, their mother swears daughters are ‘hardwired for betrayal’, again making me question King and their mother. Okay, has there been some sort of epidemic? King travels to the mainland for meager supplies, certainly if other women came to the island something is wrong on the mainland, right?

Strong feelings “weaken you”, and women are full of them. The other women who came, got sicker or better and left. Damaged women, drifting through the girls lives by boat, one even escaping as the girls themselves would if they chose to. But, why would anyone need to escape a place meant to save, a place she chose to come to? A ‘promised place’ according to her mother and King. People don’t run from a healthy world, right? As a reader it’s so hard to take the ‘preparations’ seriously. All one keeps thinking is, ‘this is one deluded couple.’ But the women ‘recoiled’ when they first saw King, so maybe there is some meat to the whole ‘world gone awry’ business. Are the men this bad or is King just feeding his girls a diet of fears to keep them from growing away, becoming women? Better to control their bodies, desires, tame their sexuality, which is why men and the mainland are such a threat. Let’s say the world is normal, much like our own, let’s face it there are enough horrors acted upon women that make them recoil too, it doesn’t require a natural disaster, just a bad man.

A lot of time is spent telling us feelings are bad, that “trauma” is a toxin, well by that token any ‘mainland’ is ruinous, dangerous, and toxic therefore there is no need for an apocalypse. “Without our father, it is very hard not to think about things going wrong.” Obviously they are all ill prepared anyway, women alone on an island, surely King had to know a time would come when he couldn’t protect them anymore? Safety in numbers, and if family is all that is true and good, shouldn’t they want to create their own families too at some point? Parents won’t live forever. Not much preparing there, eh?

When the men come and emotions catch fire, the sisters come apart. Desire can’t be contained anymore than nature can, because we are nature too. Maybe men are the toxins, with their pulling and pushing, wanting and discarding when boredom arrives. “She was just like every other woman. Eager and tender-hearted.” Girls, easily manipulated with all their wants, desires, their treacherous toxic ‘personal energies’ always in excess with girls, women. Women, trapped forever “absorbing the guilt and sorrows “ of the world. Maybe women are islands themselves. I know my review is disjointed, but that is exactly my feeling after reading the novel. I don’t trust it and yet I can dig some meaning here and there. It comes off as a sly feminist work.

Of the men, James has some insight to share about the world that is and isn’t dangerous for women, not much different from our own, really. There are lies, so many lies and maybe a life that could be ‘open’ to the girls beyond the island. I can’t divulge much more because it would ruin the story. I enjoyed the writing, it was a uniquely strange novel but I was also irritated without solid answers. No, I don’t need all my stories with happy endings, or tidy explanations but sometimes, with some stories there is a build-up and you expect something to sink your teeth into. The ending here ends up being as dreamy and open-ended as the entire novel. I am still rubbing my eyes in confusion, what was that all about in the end? I both know and don’t know, and maybe that is the intention, to be as unsure as Grace, Lia and Sky.

Publication Date in US: January 8, 2019

DoubleDay Books

Raised in fear and isolation, three sisters are taught to fear men and the poisoned world outside their own. They are made by their parents to undergo painful rituals and training to keep themselves “pure”, made to manipulate each other to make themselves stronger. When their mother and father go missing, and three men wash ashore, everything changes. The girls begin to learn the truths about the world they’ve been kept from and the lies their parents had spun for them begin to unravel.

Mackintosh’s distinct voice and unique prose really brings this story to life. Her language is magical, compelling, and lyrical; the book reads like poetry. The immersive story and beautiful language makes this debut a truly one-of-a-kind read.

TW: Self harm.

This novel follows the lives of three sisters who were raised on an island and taught to fear all men aside from their father. Believing the outside world to be dangerous, they frequently perform a set of rituals to "cleanse" themselves of the world's toxins. These rituals - sometimes ordered by their parents, sometimes self-inflicted - are meant to cause physical pain in order to release any bad or worldly emotions. It will be uncomfortable to most, but it could potentially be triggering to others.

Things start to escalate when some mysterious men show up on the island. Mackintosh does a great job of creating unease as the three sisters navigate their conflicting thoughts around these new men. That's where this novel shines -- with the introspective and interpersonal relationships. This isn't a dystopian where you will spend a lot of time exploring the world's new reality. Rather, you will be confined to the island, with the sisters.

The Water Cure is a great addition to the feminist dystopia genre. Personally, I think this will be one of the more "readable" titles on the recently-released Man Booker Longlist.

Very intriguing read. It was hard to follow at times, but the plot was unique.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own

For the most part I really enjoyed this debut novel, and while I am not quite so sure it is 'Booker material' (although I wouldn't be incensed if it DID make the shortlist), it at least managed to avoid most of the flaws of a 'first-timer'. Sure there are a few languid patches, and sometimes it seemed in need of an additional edit, but I really liked that the author didn't feel the need to cross every T or dot every I, so that one could ponder exactly was going on here without it all neatly wrapped up in a bow.

While reading, I was often reminded of other works, such as 'The Handmaid's Tale' cited in the précis, as well as former Booker nominee 'The Chimes. and Edmund White's first (largely forgotten) novel 'Forgetting Elena', and even at times of Mervyn Peake! But Mackintosh, I felt, has her own unique voice and style, and this is certainly promising enough that I am eager to see where she goes next.

My sincere thanks to both Netgalley and Doubleday for providing me with an advanced reading copy of this, in exchange for my honest review.

**Note - The blog post for this review is scheduled for 12/19, closer to the actual publication date. I would be happy to schedule sooner at the request of the publisher.**

I finished Sophie Mackintosh's The Water Cure a few days ago and instead of reviewing it straight away I had to let it sit for a bit.  I still don't fully know what to think or feel about it, so I'm going to try and muddle through my mixed feelings here to do some sort of a review.

Mackintosh's writing is to be envied.  It's lyrical and lush without being verbose.  As a matter of fact, it's somehow stark. The whole novel reads like a fever dream, with bizarre rituals and "exercises" that made my stomach turn at the level of abuse they meted out.  Behind that horror, there's the feeling on Lia's constant, claustrophobic need for love and affection--and rightfully so.  That's all a hard balance to achieve, and I can totally see why it's on the Man Booker Longlist for 2018 even ahead of its US publication date.

Ultimately, The Water Cure is a beautifully written book with terrifying subject matter, though it does leave the reader with more questions than answers.  I highly recommend--even though I still don't know how I feel about it.

The Water Cure was nothing like I expected, but I ended up enjoying it all the more for that. This is a vaguely unsettling, eerie tale of three sisters who were raised by their parents on a remote island to fear all men other than their father. They believe the outside world is dangerous and toxic, and they regularly perform painful rituals and ‘therapies’ to cleanse themselves. But then their father vanishes without a trace and three strange men wash up on their shore, and the novel takes place over the span of the week that follows.

The biggest surprise for me was that I was expecting a Handmaid’s Tale-esque feminist dystopia, but in reality I wouldn’t actually describe this book as a dystopia at all. I think a certain amount of ambiguity in this regard is intentional, especially at first, and I think there is going to be some healthy debate about how you can read this book, as a lot of questions deliberately go unanswered. But if the appeal of dystopias to you is the worldbuilding and big picture stuff, The Water Cure will undoubtedly disappoint. To me this felt more like an allegorical contemporary (or if not contemporary, at least set in the very near-future) whose strength lies more in its exploration of complex interpersonal dynamics than in its merit as a dystopic text. I’d compare it to King Lear or The Beguiled (and I would not be surprised if Sofia Coppola directed an eventual film adaptation) over The Handmaid’s Tale or The Power.

But for me, its inability to fit neatly into the ‘feminist dystopia’ genre is only an asset. Sophie Mackintosh has created something strong and uniquely unsettling. Her prose is remarkably lyrical, and the insular setting she crafts is at once immersive and claustrophobic. This is a novel whose themes exist slightly below the surface, and though it has a lot to say about gender roles and social dynamics and what it means to exist in modern society as a woman, none of this leaps off the page at a quick glance. There’s an incredible amount of depth and subtlety here, especially for such a short novel.

The biggest problem – really, the only problem – I had with this novel was that I was occasionally unconvinced by the fact that these sisters had lived their entire lives so removed from society. Not only were their vocabularies littered with colloquial phrases in a way that seemed at odds from how their parents spoke, at times they drew generalizations about human nature in a way that didn’t ring true for someone with such a limited world view. But this is something I found myself forgiving more and more as the novel went on, as it ultimately had the air of a fable, and I didn’t find myself too hung up on the details.

Basically, don’t expect another Handmaid’s Tale, but don’t think it isn’t worth your time because of that. I actually liked The Water Cure better.

*This book was provided to me by the publisher via NetGalley for review purposes*

This book is difficult to describe. The basic plot is that a husband and wife and their three daughters isolate themselves form the rest of the world on an island, with the purpose of ridding themselves of the violence of the rest of the world. They partake in ritualistic cleansing, mostly the three daughters; Lia, Grace and Sky. One day King, the father figure, leaves the island for supplies and never returns. Shortly after his disappearance three strange men arrive on the island. The majority of the plot takes place over the course of the week that these strange men on the island.
My favorite thing about this book was the writing. The writing was beautiful. The overall tone had a calm and sort of fluid quality. The writing style mimicked the flow and feeling of water, in a way that reflected the importance of water in the plot.
I wasn't a huge fan of what the plot was trying to do. I enjoyed the underlying feminist message that it was trying to convey, but the central theme got a bit muddled at some point. I was unclear about what the author was trying to tell us when it came to the parts about the sisters and their interactions with the strange men. At some point the author reveals something about one of the characters that is pretty easy to deduce from the beginning of the book. She reveals this fact about 3/4 into the book, even though it was pretty obvious from the beginning. I thought that the interactions between the sister and the men was pretty confusing. Again, I was unsure about what she was trying to say about feminism or society with the use of the plot. All I got was that the sisters hate the men and only trust other women and that men are the cause of all the evil that has befallen them. I'm not saying that this was the author's purpose, it's just how I interpreted it. I think that if the plot had a more defined point of conflict and resolution, I would've enjoyed it much more.

In looking through the reviews of The Water Cure, I can understand why many reviewers loved this book. The prose is very hypnotic. I wasn't one of those who enjoyed it, however. The type of writing and the book style is just not really my cup of tea.

I was really intrigued by the synopsis of this book where three sisters are kept apart from the world. I assumed that it was because of some kind of apocalypse as the girls were told the world and the men were toxic and the island they were on was quarantined. But, the more I read, and the bizarreness of the story and the "cures", I now think it was the parents who were toxic.

For me, this was a very uncomfortable read. The girls were constantly being subjected to cures which I just saw as torture.

I'm sure that I experienced what the author was trying to portray, but like I said earlier, this book, the writing, the characters, the world... None of it was my cup of tea.

*Thank you to NetGalley and Doubleday Books for the advance copy.*

Atmospheric and deep, this book is not to be missed. The characters are well drawn and sympathetic and I just loved it!

Grace, Lia and Sky are three sisters whose parents have taken them away from civilization to live on an island after a strange plague has hit. The sickness is especially dangerous to women, causing severe symptoms and seems to cause men to become more aggressive towards the opposite sex, while not making them ill at all. Raised by the mother and their father, King, in safety and seclusion, the girls are put through "therapies" to teach them how to survive, and rid them of any toxins from the outside world. When King dies, the girl's survival instincts and training are put to the test, and what follows is a dark and haunting story that leaves you with just the right amount of questions... This may be my favorite read so far this year...

This book kept me interested enough to read to the end, but it was quite odd and the ending was slightly unsatisfying.

DNF at about 20% in.

Too abstract for me. After reading some reviews, it seems I am not the only one. Many reviews also said that a lot of questions go unanswered and the reader is left to make their own conclusions, so I don't want to waste time when there are many other books on my TBR.

Weird, wacky, beautiful, frustrating, hypnotizing and wholly original! I am still turning these characters and their lives over in my mind, in a good way.