Actor Lili Taylor brings a wry warmth to her narration of Campbell's latest, set in Michigan's Great Massasauga Swamp, where a family contends with secrets and intergenerational trauma. Taylor portrays imperious Hermine Zook, who is raising her 11-year-old granddaughter, Dorothy, nicknamed Donkey, on a secluded island in the middle of the swamp. When tragedy strikes, Donkey's relationship with her flighty mother and her opinionated, occasionally prickly aunts comes to a head. Though Taylor provides an appealing portrait of this unusual family, listeners may wish for better character differentiation, as the voices are quite similar in tone and presentation. Additionally, Taylor's frequent mouth sounds and inconsistent pronunciations distract listeners. Even so, her depiction of the family's deep love for each other and the land resonates. S.A.H. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
11/06/2023
The evocative if meandering latest from Campbell (Mothers, Tell Your Daughters ) portrays an herbalist and her family living off the grid on a swamp-enclosed Michigan island, a gauzy out-of-time setting meant to suggest a realm of myth. Hermine “Herself” Zook has long made herbal medicines with the help of her mother’s ghost. Some on the mainland see her as a witch, however, and no one knows why she banished her husband from the island 15 years earlier. After Rose Thorn, 18, the youngest of Herself’s three adult daughters, gives birth to a baby girl named Donkey, Rose Thorn confides to Herself that Donkey is not the daughter of her boyfriend Titus Clay Jr., but the result of a rape by his father. Rose Thorn pleads with Herself not to tell anyone, and Herself raises Donkey in the family’s island cottage. Rose Thorn spends most of her time with her sister in California while her daughter yearns for her to reappear and marry Titus Jr. At 11, Donkey must contend with news of her mother’s breast cancer and revelations about her family’s lineage. Baggy writing, drawn-out scenes, and twee character names aren’t doing this story any favors, but Campbell’s immersive descriptions manage to suck the reader into its swampy setting. Patient readers will be carried away. (Jan.)
"On a swampy island in Michigan, an outcast herbalist and her granddaughter contend with traumatic family secrets and an absent mother in this vividly drawn corner of rural America."
New York Times Book Review
"If you enjoy reading about strong, independent, purposeful women who thrive in the face of adversity and in spite of serious flaws, both personal and professional, this is a book for you[.] From lurking vengeful locals with firearms to deadly snakes protected by federal law, this tale moves irresistibly to an end that fulfills the promise of the rest of the book. It also addresses some trenchant current issues that appear in the news daily but are not, in fact new, but age-old problems that continue to baffle those with prospective solutions. It is a muscular and meaningful book that should be great book group material."
"Campbell, who lives outside Kalamazoo, Michigan, is one of American fiction’s leading voices about rural life: the struggle to make a living, the beauty of the wild environment, the thorny and sometimes violent relationships between men and women, and the economic and industrial pressures that threaten everything…filled with vivid descriptions of the diverse flora of this wetlands, The Waters is a realistic novel with a strong thread of fairy tale running through it[.] The Waters builds toward an incredible climactic episode that addresses the great divide running through this imperiled community."
Bonnie Jo Campbell's "The Waters" plunges into the swamp between men and women - Milwaukee Journal Sentine - Jim Higgins
"Campbell has been exploring hardship, especially the hardships that independent and exploratory women have to work through, for most of her writing career. She knows that unexpected misfortunes have to be put up with, and the question is always whether to do it your own way or to give in to the people around you and embark on a life you do not want…The Waters is a thought-provoking and readable exploration of eccentricity and of all different kinds of love—familial love, romantic love, love of knowledge, love of animals and love of one’s own environment, even when it is a difficult place to live."
An off-the-grid herbalist hits the skids in an earthy new Bonnie Jo Campbell novel - Los Angeles Times Book Review - Jane Smiley
"There are scenes of sadness and turmoil in Bonnie Jo Campbell’s superb new novel, but at its core is an abiding sense of wonder. We encounter that wonder in Campbell’s minute attentive-ness to her rural Michigan landscape as well as to her understanding of the complexities of the human heart. Nevertheless, for all the novel’s vividness, The Waters has an ethereal quality that we enter as if into a waking dream, and even after we turn the last page, we remain under its spell, enchanted"
"Bonnie Jo Campbell’s The Waters is a novel, a living myth, and a place.… Imagine a mash-up of Flannery O’Connor and the Brothers Grimm, of Angela Carter’s reimagined fairy tales and William Faulkner’s gothic sublime. And yet, The Waters is all Bonnie Jo. If you’ve read her, you know what I mean, how she sees and evokes us, and this land we inhabit, covered in mayapples and dogwood, cuntshells and quickmuck, with a masterful, tender objectivity. The Waters is no utopia. It is muddy and bloody; it swallows us whole and effervesces into fog. It is the magic we’d inhabit if we still believed in magic, the dream we’d have if we could sleep."
"This is a verdant, gripping, and clarion saga of home, family, and womanhood, of meaningful work and metamorphosis, of poisons and antidotes, and the urgent need for us to heal and sustain the imperiled living world that heals and sustains us."
Booklist (starred review) - Donna Seaman
"Bonnie Jo Campbell is one of the chief practitioners of Midwestern Gothic, and the National Book Award finalist’s first novel in a dozen years is reason to rejoice. The Waters is an indelible portrait of rural Michigan and the women tough enough to live there, with writing so evocative it practically sprouts in your hands. Lush, brackish, and bracing, The Waters is not so much read as steeped in."
The Christian Science Monitor
"With its detailed portrayal of nature and its mystical elements, The Waters paints a vivid picture of life in a rural area."
Detroit Free Press - Julie Hinds
"For Campbell, the dose of pixie dust is thoroughly diluted in a stream of gritty reality; her style never leaves the loamy land behind[.] Once you get thoroughly sunk into the story, you’ll resent ever having to leave this matriarchal family that insists on preserving its own peculiar ways in a world determined to move on…Campbell’s most astonishing feat is bringing The Waters to a climax that abandons the fantasy of her “once upon a time” opening and yet eventually delivers us to a place of real magic we never could have anticipated."
Bonnie Jo Campbell's 'The Waters' is pure magic - Washington Post Book Review - Ron Charles
"With an electrifying vocabulary all its own (here, cigarettes are coffin nails, and plant names roll off the tongue with ease), The Waters is a novel that is rife with enchantments—a classic in the making, introducing generations of heroines who are destined to be beloved."
Foreward (starred review) - Michelle Schingler
"Bonnie Jo Campbell has quietly become one of our best writers. She brings news you haven’t heard before, and that’s why I read. Her new novel, The Waters , is written in prose strong and lyrical, and tells a story so deeply rooted in a specific place that the accumulation of details approaches the magical."
"The Waters will suck you into its muddy gut and not let go.… A powerful, fragrant, readable, almost edible novel. In The Waters , Bonnie Jo Campbell, who understands the women and men of the no-longer-prosperous rural Midwest better than anyone, dreams up a marshy Northwoods township where factual flora and fauna, soil quality and agricultural practice, demographics and religious affiliation somehow share a long, dotted, antic boundary line with Oz and The Blue Fairy Book , with märchen, folkways, and ancient myth."
"…one of the most important voices in American fiction. "
Book Riot - Rebecca Jones Schinski
"I especially loved all the descriptive details…[The Waters ] is a wonderful winter read that has you inspired for warmer springtime weather ahead."
New York Post - Victoria Giardina
"Captivating…A novel that’s rife with enchantments—a classic in the making, introducing generations of heroines who are destined to be beloved."
2023-07-13
A fairy-tale atmosphere coexists with harsh realities from the opening sentence: “Once upon a time M’sauga Island was the place where desperate mothers abandoned baby girls and where young women went seeking to prevent babies altogether.” The island is home to elderly Hermine “Herself” Zook, who fabricates medicines from wild plants that populate the wetlands separating the island from the town of Whiteheart, and her 11-year-old granddaughter, Donkey. The girl is nicknamed for the animal milk that nourished her as an infant after her mother, Rose Thorn, left her with Hermine. Rose was raped by Titus Clay Sr., the father of her true love, and chose flight over telling Titus Jr. She lives in California with her sister, Primrose, who broke up the Zook family by having an affair at 17 with Hermine’s husband, her adopted father. Women are not merely victims, and men are not only predators in Campbell’s complex portrait of rural society, which includes several scenes with a drunken chorus of local men displaying confusion over their place in the world—as well as an ongoing fascination with the beautiful Rose Thorn, who makes periodic appearances to unsettle poor Titus Jr. Third sister Molly, nurse at a nearby hospital, also drops by to proclaim the dangers of Hermine’s off-the-grid lifestyle and the urgent necessity of sending her niece to school. Donkey, more comfortable with math and animals than people, is torn between her desire for an education and loyalty to her grandmother, both revered and stigmatized by the locals who buy her potions but view her as more or less a witch. The wise woman privy to nature’s secrets has become an overused fictional trope, but it’s mitigated here by Campbell’s sharply drawn characters and her refusal to make easy judgments about them. A birth rather predictably reconciles the town’s men with the Zook women, but the new arrival does not solve everyone’s problems. Campbell’s thoughtfully rendered characters find life rewarding and bewildering in equal measures.
Atmospheric, well written, and generally satisfying despite some overly familiar elements.
