Name: Isobel Gostling's review of The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh
Item: The Water Cure
Rating: 4
Author: Isobel Gostling

Sophie Mackintosh

*This ebook edition includes an exclusive extract from Sophie Mackintosh's hotly anticipated second novel, Blue Ticket* British Vogue 'Star of the Future' for 2020 Independent Best Books of the Decade 'A gripping, sinister fable' Margaret Atwood (via Twitter) 'An extraordinary debut - otherworldly, luminous, precise' Guardian 'Bold, inventive, haunting... With shades of Margaret Atwood and Eimear McBride, you'll be bowled over by it' Stylist Grace, Lia and Sky live in an abandoned hotel, on a sun-bleached island, beside a poisoned sea. Their parents raised them there to keep them safe, to make them good. The world beyond the water is contaminated and men are the contamination. But one day three strangers wash ashore - men who stare at the sisters hungrily, helplessly. Men who bring trouble. 'Visceral, hypnotic . . . with one of my favourite endings I've read in a long while' The Pool 'An unsettling dark fantasy... [It] lingers long after the final page' Daily Telegraph 'Otherworldly, brutal and poetic: a feminist fable set by the sea, a female Lord of the Flies. It felt like a book I'd been waiting to read for a long time' Emma Jane Unsworth

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018

The Water Cure

"A gripping, sinister fable!"--Margaret Atwood, via Twitter LONGLISTED FOR THE 2018 MAN BOOKER PRIZE l The Handmaid's Tale meets The Virgin Suicides in this dystopic feminist revenge fantasy about three sisters on an isolated island, raised to fear men King has tenderly staked out a territory for his wife and three daughters, Grace, Lia, and Sky. He has lain the barbed wire; he has anchored the buoys in the water; he has marked out a clear message: Do not enter. Or viewed from another angle: Not safe to leave. Here women are protected from the chaos and violence of men on the mainland. The cult-like rituals and therapies they endure fortify them from the spreading toxicity of a degrading world. But when their father, the only man they've ever seen, disappears, they retreat further inward until the day two men and a boy wash ashore. Over the span of one blistering hot week, a psychological cat-and-mouse game plays out. Sexual tensions and sibling rivalries flare as the sisters confront the amorphous threat the strangers represent. Can they survive the men? A haunting, riveting debut about the capacity for violence and the potency of female desire, The Water Cure both devastates and astonishes as it reflects our own world back at us.

Gemma

The more I learned, the more I realized that even being physically removed from it wouldn't save us. The violence came for all women, border or no border. It was already in our blood, in our collective memory. And one day the men would come for us too.

That was the source of the anger. Stronger in the damaged women, but it was also there in us. The potentiality.

Abigail Mills

What must it be like, to live in a world that wants to kill you? Where every breath is an afront? 

'A ghost, out on the sea,” and she sits up as if she has been expecting it.

I turn away and stare at the sea, trying to find the point where I let the baby go. The supple water is forever changing. It's almost like it never happened, which gives me hope that one day it will be like it never happened.

“I'm giving him back to you”, I tell the sea. There is no answer as I lower my arms into the water up to the elbow. The small parcel falls down through the water. Burial at Sea. The only honourable option.

Crying lays you low and vulnerable, racks your body. If water is the cure for what ails us, the water that comes from our own faces and hearts is the wrong sort. It has absorbed our pain and is dangerous to let loose

Water washes the drawings away. Takes away trauma/painful memories. 

We stayed there until the tide came up and reached the ashes, turned them into sludge.

Once I was caughtopening one of the magazines. […] Though I didn't make it past the second page I was still required to wear latex gloves for the rest of that week in case I contaminated anyone, and I was banned from dinner for the rest of the week too. My sisters brought me discs of sweatily buttered bread and dry fish that they had hidden in their laps. Grace accompanied her offerings with strict words about how stupid I was; Sky brought hers with sincere guilt about raising the alarm. I forgave her easily because the scream was proof of concern, of love, the same way she would have screamed had a viper been raising its head, fangs bared towards my outstretched hand. 

We unloaded the boat as he dragged his body upstairs to soak in the tub, to let the scum of the outside world fall away. By the time he came back down for dinner he was a little livelier

You see?' he would tell us as we surrounded the fallen sister, as we flicked water against skin. 'You see how quickly you'd die out there?"

We were not supposed to watch. UIe The women drank the salt water first, their faces pained. Than threw up repeatedly into the buckets. Their bodies convulsed They lay on the floor but Mother helped them up, insistent. They rinsed their mouths, spat. Then they drank from the second row, glas after glass of our good and pure water, the water that came from our taps like a miracle, the water that the sprinklers cast out in the early dusk like a veil across the garden. The water we ourselves drank by the pint first thing every morning, Mother watching our throats as we swallowed. The women took it into themselves. It was a start. The water flamed their cells and blood. Soon the glasses were all empty.

Strong feelings weaken you, open up your body like a wound. It takes we have learned how to dampen them down, how to practie vigilance and regular therapies to hold them at bay. Over the years as diagl out the bad feel to lick the skin of my f pain go. release emotion under strict conditions only, how to own our pain can cough it into muslin, trap it as bubbles under the water. let it from my very blood.

My feelings are limping, wretched things. Underwater., staring at the stained tiles, I scream as loudly as I can. The water kills the e Opening my eyes, I turn on to my back and watch the sun throuel. sound. the water, a rippling orb of light. It is at times like these that I, can imagine holding myself down until the water floods my lungs, that I realize it wouldn't even be so hard. The real trick is how and why we continue surviving at all

Isobel Gostling

I actually don't know what to think. It wasn't bad, but I didn't like it at all.

Once upon a time, damaged women came here to be cured. We took them in, fed them glasses of our clean, good water, let them scream at the waves till their lips split like ripe fruit. Now no one is left but my sisters and me. King died a year ago, quite suddenly. Mother has vanished, no one knows where. And the safe compound they built around us, far away from the toxic world, has finally been breached. Three men arrived last week, washed up by the sea, their gazes hungry and insistent. We remember now what our father taught us. 'If the men come to you, show yourself some mercy. Don't stick around and wait for them to put you out of your misery.'

Water Cure The

Eva Ströberg

The water cure - Sophie Mackintosh
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⭐️⭐️
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It’s really an odd book, a near dystopian, if you can call it, but the pace is way too slow for me.
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#sophiemackinstosh #thewatercure #bookstagram #booksbooksbooks #currentlyreading #2024reads #2024readingchallenge

Ditipriya Acharya

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.

'A gripping, sinister fable' Margaret Atwood (via Twitter) 'An extraordinary debut. Otherworldly, luminous, precise... She is writing the way that Sofia Coppola would shoot the end of the world' Guardian 'Bold, inventive, haunting... With shades of Margaret Atwood and Eimear McBride, you'll be bowled over by it' Stylist You are a girl. Your body is vulnerable. Men will break it if they can - and out there, they absolutely can. Suffering will prepare you for the worst. The cure is nothing compared to what you've been spared in the sickness. It takes a lot of love to hurt you like this. Now, come outside. It's time to play the drowning game. Imagine three sisters raised on an island, taught to fear the outside world and its men. And imagine the men who come to find them: three strangers washed up by the sea, bringing desire and destruction in their wake... 'Eerie, electric, beautiful. It rushes you through to the end on a tide of tension and closely held panic. I loved this book' Daisy Johnson, Man Booker-shortlisted author of Everything Under 'Otherworldly, brutal and poetic: a feminist fable set by the sea, a female Lord of the Flies. It felt like a book I'd been waiting to read for a long time' Emma Jane Unsworth, author of Animals

A Novel

Tish

I should have dnf this one buuut here we are.

Lacy W

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.

Alexa M

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!

Rachel Kanyid

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

Marloes

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.

Fraser Simons

Interesting concept and I liked the prose a lot.

✨Tyler ✨

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.

Maureen Wadsworth 

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

Haley McDowell

THE LITERARY DEBUT OF THE SUMMER 2018 'An extraordinary debut novel. Otherworldly, luminous, precise... She is writing the way that Sofia Coppola would shoot the end of the world' Guardian 'Bold, inventive, haunting... With shades of Margaret Atwood and Eimear McBride, you'll be bowled over by it' Stylist 'Visceral, hypnotic... with one of my favourite endings I've read in a long while' The Pool Imagine a world very close to our own: where women are not safe in their bodies, where desperate measures are required to raise a daughter. This is the story of Grace, Lia and Sky, kept apart from the world for their own good and taught the terrible things that every woman must learn about love. And it is the story of the men who come to find them - three strangers washed up by the sea, their gazes hungry and insistent, trailing desire and destruction in their wake. The Water Cure is a fever dream, a blazing vision of suffering, sisterhood and transformation. 'If you're a fan of The Handmaid's Tale you'll love this one' Evening Standard 'Immensely assured, calmly devastating' Katherine Angel, author of Unmastered 'A work of cool, claustrophobic beauty' Eli Goldstone, author of Strange Heart Beating 'Eerily beautiful, strange [and] unsettling' Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train 'Otherworldly, brutal and poetic: a feminist fable set by the sea, a female Lord of the Flies. It transported me, savaged me, filled me with hope and fear. It felt like a book I'd been waiting to read for a long time' Emma Jane Unsworth, author of Animals

Charlotte Rayfield

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.

Jennifer Rittall

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

Olivera Mitić

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

The Handmaid's Tale meets The Virgin Suicides in this dystopic feminist revenge fantasy about three sisters on an isolated island, raised to fear men. "A gripping, sinister fable!"--Margaret Atwood, via Twitter King has tenderly staked out a territory for his wife and three daughters. He has lain the barbed wire; he has anchored the buoys in the water; he has marked out a clear message: Do not enter. Or viewed from another angle: Not safe to leave. Here women are protected from the chaos and violence of men on the mainland. The cult-like rituals and therapies they endure fortify them from the spreading toxicity of a degrading world. But when their father, the only man they've ever seen, disappears, the sisters retreat further inward until the day two men and a boy wash ashore. Over the span of one blistering hot week, a psychological cat-and-mouse game plays out. Sexual tensions and sibling rivalries flare as the sisters confront the amorphous threat the strangers represent. Can they survive this invasion? An will the male intruders? A haunting, riveting debut about the capacity for violence and the potency of female desire, The Water Cure both devastates and astonishes as it reflects our own world back at us.

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018

Léa Beauchemin-Laporte

Chelsea White

*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.

Rachel

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.

Gordon McLean

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.

Isobel Gostling &
The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh

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