The water cure - Sophie Mackintosh . ⭐️⭐️ . This book is so disturbing in many levels and usually it scores pretty high on yours truly preference rating, but not this one. It’s both disturbing and quite slow in narration, so that made me even more impatient to know the ending that felt never came. . Grace, Lia and Sky are three daughters (of unknown age, we only found out about Grace’s age near the end of the book) raised in an isolated place with a mother and a father that they called King. . The daughters were taught to fear men, that men cause all the problems in the world. The parents kept them under strict diet and exposed them to many different “cures” to prevent the disease of men from reaching them. . It’s really an odd book, a near dystopian, if you can call it, but the pace is way too slow for me. . #sophiemackinstosh #thewatercure #bookstagram #booksbooksbooks #currentlyreading #2024reads #2024readingchallenge

Reading this at any other time would have been unsettling but reading it in 2020 during the lockdown made the experience stranger than intended. Even though the subject matter of the book has nothing to do with the pandemic.

I should have dnf this one buuut here we are.

A special thank you goes out to Netgalley and Double Day publishing for allowing me to read this eARC early. All thoughts and opinions are my own. tw: animal abuse, child abuse, self harm, murder, child death This has go to be one of the weirdest and most out there books I've ever read. Honestly, I have no idea what in the world I read and I probably still won't know long after. Was it about a cult? Was it just a family trying to survive by any means necessary? I can't tell you because I do not know. The prose on this book was probably some of the best prose I've ever read. It was beautiful and so very haunting. Every single sentence was crafted meticulously. Each word was thought about very carefully and considered for the sentence. I can tell that there was a lot of work put into just the crafting of the sentences and I loved that. But the prose got in the way of the story at times. Because the writing was so flowery, I was often confused about what was happening. Maybe that was the purpose? To be super mysterious? I don't know. But I wish it had gotten straight to the point at times when it was needed. Especially with some of the reveals at the end. I just wanted to know what happened. Overall, this is just one of those books you got to read for yourself. I know that this is a super short review but I can't really say much about this book without giving it all away. This is really all I can tell you. Despite my average rating, I can't wait to see what else Sophie Mackintosh writes next.

beautiful writing style! the overall plot was nothing crazy amazing but i enjoyed reading this. this read more as cult fiction-esque than dystopian because we don't see the "outside world" at all. but regardless- i think the book did what it set out to do and i liked it!

Not even sure what entirely to think of this book. It was interesting... But I don't know.

This book is marked as feminist, but it isn't. It's making mountains out of molehills and being as purposefully hurt as possible over small slights. It's being cruel to a group of people, to those you would label as "others" who are different from yourself. And that's not ok.

Interesting concept and I liked the prose a lot.

when I saw the Margaret Atwood review on the cover, I should have known I wasn't going to like this book. I didn't like handmaid's tale and I didn't like this.

Couldn't finish it, didn't want to finish it, but I made myself finish it. One word- disappointed.

Oh my god

Let me be clear. This book is a five star book. But it is unsettling. A story that sticks just underneath your rib cage, lodged as some sort of reminder. It’s a book about love. And what that does to you. Parents desire to protect their children. Something so simple turning sour. What happens when love is had. When humans become monsters. You start this book assuming the men are the only monsters, but you would be wrong. It’s about being desperate for something and how damaging is that can be. I don’t even know what that was. All I know is I bought it this afternoon and inhaled it. Nothing is clear in this book. Answers aren’t given. But maybe that’s the point. To leave you just as touch starved and desperate as the sisters. Either way, this book and it’s prose will stick to my soul for a while.

I almost didn’t finish this one. Too many questions made me keep reading until the but unfortunately they remain unanswered.

Ne znam kakav odnos Sofi Makintoš ima sa majkom and at this point I'm too afraid to ask.

3.5/5

*2.5 stars* I was truly excited to read this book, but felt like I had to trudge through after just a few pages. While there are references to the outside world, mostly told from the Mother’s perspective (I’m assuming), there is no great reasoning for WHY they moved to an island. Was there a major shift in society that allowed men to be cruel and abusive toward women? Or is it status quo that King and the Mother want to move from? This is barely touching on how abusive King and another are to these girls (women? They mention Grace’s age just once.) to the point that they are all almost the same person, and they all seem hollow. I had hoped that this novel would truly live up to the dystopian label, but instead it was just a thinly veiled book semi-romanticizing abuse (until the girls learned what the men had been sent to do), and an ode to the patriarchy the island had been set up to avoid. All the narration was so similar in tone that I had to listen to this book to really grasp the differences in the characters, and even then it was a little difficult.

I have mixed feelings towards The Water Cure. This book has been hyped up as a feminist dystopia and it really isn't by any means. Three women live on an island with their mother and "King" aka their dad, because according to the vague prose this book is riddled with, there is some kind of toxin that hurts women and men give it off (????). Of course the women only know this because it is what they have been told by their parents, nothing fishy there.... King goes missing and is assumed dead. Two men and a boy end up on their remote island seeking shelter. From the very start of the book the reader can feel something is off on the story the daughters are being told about toxins, which immediately eliminates the feminist dystopia ruse and I can't help but feel it got that label to get the book more attention or try to act like it is a feminist dystopian so the big surprise is a shock, in which case the story immediately falls apart). The vagueness of the prose style writing was a bit annoying as well. 3 stars because it kept my interest, but not much else.

Stunning The type of book you hope never ends. Words so carefully chosen and placed made this a sumptuous read, the intriguing story pulling you along. Glorious.