I really wanted to like this as I have enjoyed Sophie Mackintosh's work previously, but it just didn't speak to me for some reason. Mackintosh is clearly a talented and original writer, and I will read her next book – this one just wasn't for me.

The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh was a must read for me as soon as I saw it has both been compared to my favourite book The Handmaid’s Tale and also that it has been recommended by my favourite author Margaret Atwood.

Sisters Lia Grace and Sky have grown up on an Island with their mother and recently deceased father. The Mainland has been contaminated but is still accessible by boat for the purchase of necessities at great personal risk.

Out of necessity the book is vague on the details of what exactly happened to make it so and at times this can be frustrating until you realise why the author has chosen to write it in this way.

It Is clear as the book progresses that their mother and King, their father had brought the children up in a highly unusual and abusive fashion. The girls are expected to take part in ‘therapies’ to protect themselves from the outside world.

These therapies consist of things such as ‘the drowning game’ and ‘drawing irons’ to allocate love.

“We would all still love each other; but what it meant was, if there was a burning fire, if two sisters were stuck in the inferno and they were screaming a name, the only right thing would be to pick the one the iron dictated to save.

It’s important to ignore any contrary instinct of your traitor heart. We were quite used to that.”

Emotions are things to be feared and tightly controlled to the point where even love is seen as something to ration and use. Men are something to be feared and avoided at all costs with the exception of King.

Then three men wash up on the island unexpectedly and the girls are introduced to the concept of sexuality and begin to lapse in their devotion to the therapies.

At its most basic The Water Cure is a novel about the complex bond between three sisters and the lengths they will go to in order to protect each other.

One thing I had not come across previously was the use of chapters written in the perspective of multiple characters, for example, the chapters written from the perspective of all of three of the sisters at once. Each one of the sisters’ individual identity was supressed by their parents and this is reflected in the writing style used by the author.

Having said this, I can understand why some people found this a struggle. It is my ideal kind of read because I love dystopia’s but the pacing in the beginning of the book was an issue for me and I struggled initially to get into it.

The Water Cure contains everything I love in a book and has become one of my favourites of 2018. The premise of the book is very good and will stay with you long after finishing. A haunting and promising debut.

A strong start, an intriguing concept and a dream-like storytelling style helped me whizz through this book. Beautifully written, but I was left wanting something a little more in way of explanation.

I read a review of The Water Cure that mentioned the films of Sofia Coppola, and I can't think of a better comparison. They share a haunting, hallucinatory feeling, a sense of being adrift (apt, considering the title). It took me a while to adapt to the prose style, and it's more meandering and slow-paced than I usually enjoy, but so worth persevering. Highly recommended.

There was something amiss here. I am always drawn to dystopian fiction and fantasy, especially when it's by female writers and has a feminist agenda. The Water Cure is just that: a feminist dystopian fantasty about a family living in isolation in a world that has experienced some form of environmental catastrophe. The story focuses on three sisters who have been sheltered from the outside community because, putting it simply, men are evil and out to harm them. It's an interesting premise and I was hopeful, but it lacked substance and left me feeling unsatisfied.

Grace, Lia and Sky are pale and underweight, they are forced to play cruel mind games with each other and use love as a weapon of sorts. One of them self-harms, another one is pregnant when the book opens. Cruel tests of endurance are inflicted upon them in strange and nightmarish scenarios and there is a sense of both fear and innocence about their reality. It intensifies when their father, King, goes missing while out in the wider community and three men suddenly wash ashore. Over the following week, the presence of the men highlight the affects of repressed female sexuality and the threats of sibling rivalry but while the drama is engaging, the pace starts to lag, ultimately leading to a slightly weak and emotionless crescendo and very few startling revelations.

The writing here is stunning. The prose is brimming with evocative imagery and I really liked how Mackintosh plays with narrative voices and perspectives. I also really enjoyed the passages dedicated to the sisters and their dynamic/dysfunctional relationship, particularly the looks back to their childhood. But there is something about the book that just didn't do it for me. The best way I can describe it is that there was a slow-motion vibe to it, that reading it was like walking underwater or trying to move through someone else's bad dream. It was like being suspended in treacle.

That being said, I would be interested in reading what Mackintosh releases next because both the premise and the writing were promising.

I thought this novel was utterly unusual. It took me a few chapters to really sink into the story, but then it had me. The Water Cure is otherworldly and gripping. I loved the depiction of sisterhood here, as well as the overall feel of the haunting, lush and broken landscape they girls are marooned in. I was gripped till the novel's conclusion, and never quite knew what was around the corner in this unsettling world. Unforgettable.

A truly gripping novel- this had me hooked from the start. Fully deserving of the hype and awards. Like all brilliant mysteries, it all comes together at the end.

It is a wonderfully disorientating novel. Is the world as we first see it? Or are things not entirely what they seem and are we, and the girls, being lead down a garden path. Are our initial perceptions of the story ill aligned to the actual reality?

The skill of the book, and of Mackintosh’s writing, is that this question is never quite answered – all scenarios are open and equally plausible as the story unfolds, and it’s possible that no two readers will reach the same conclusion.

It is a tough and emotionally draining read but one that lingers long after the final page has been read

Am I missing something here? I feel as though I am.
To be honest, more than a month after finishing this book, I still don’t know how I feel about The Water Cure. I don’t know if I fully understood what was going on; if I grasped the point Sophie Mackintosh was trying to make; or why this book ended up on the longlist for this year’s Man Booker Prize.
Hit me up if you know the answer to any of the above because I really would like to know.
From what I grasped of it, The Water Cure was incredibly abstract and odd — the writing style purposefully (accidentally? Who knows? Not me) kept the reader at a distance and the actions of the characters often made little to no sense. This sense of distance only added to the confusion that the novel created: the three sisters who make up the viewpoint of The Water Cure, have been isolated from the evils of men on the mainland and the only information they have is the little their father deigns to tell them. They take the knowledge blindly as the truth, both trusting him implicitly and not knowing any different.
Their dynamic (and the wider one of the travelling women and the ‘water cure’) felt almost cultish. And, added to how quick the mother, father and sisters’ are to turn to violence, I found The Water Cure to be more of a commentary on Munchausens-by-Proxy than the genre-defining feminist manifesto that I think Sophie Mackintosh was actually aiming for.

I had really mixed feelings about this book - I really wanted to like it but struggled to be attached to any of the characters. Well written but not my cup of tea.

Three sisters, Grace, Lia and Sky live in a large house that used to be a retreat for suffering women seeking to heal themselves from the wrongs of men. The sisters live there with their father and mother. They undergo treatments and cures, they prepare themselves for the fight against the contaminated world outside the parameters of the house. They survive on goods their father brings from the mainland. He sails away for three days, trading talismans that the women sew, wearing a white suit to deflect contamination.

The rituals and treatments, the cures, are cruel, designed to test obedience and strength, to keep their womanly and dangerous feelings in check.

Then their father is gone with one of the boats. A blood stained shoe washes up on the shore. What will they do now he is gone?

There is much to admire in this novel. The constant uncertainty about the world these girls live in – is it really contaminated outside their borders? Are men really such a threat? Have things changed? – and the way their family has been forced to look inwards makes for a claustrophobic and intense narrative in which their relationships with each other count more than anything. That intensity is compelling and unnerving, born out in chapters that are sometimes from one daughter’s perspective and sometimes from all three. The passion they feel for each other is not only loving it is also jealous, full of fear and ripe with violence.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novel. I can’t say what it is that I take away though. I’m not sure what it means to say or question about the inherent tendencies of men and women – a subject it definitely explores. I can’t predict what the girls will find at the end of the novel either. In a sense, it’s a book made for a Netflix adaptation with this book as the first series, ending on a cliffhanger that could go in multiple directions. I know that the relationships between the sisters are compelling enough to make me want to see more of them, to uncover more details of their past and to see how their personalities and loves would be revealed or shaped by what they go on to find, but I’m left with very little sense of the world they will encounter or how necessary their outlook will prove to be. It’s an end that promises a new beginning – which is great – but also leaves little sense of resolution.

You could argue that the novel is a meditation on family, on those strange rules and rituals that we all take for granted in our nuclear groupings. The rules we don’t fully question until we experience the lives of other families, or until we grow enough to see our parents manipulate the rules they set out, forcing questions about the motivations and origins of the rules. Even then changing rules is difficult. They are sometimes impossible to completely destroy as if a certain way of being and reacting has become part of our flesh, painful to evict, hard to avoid.

One of the rituals that seems to be motivated by fairness, is the ritual of drawing irons. It’s a confusing ritual, the particulars of which don’t make a lot of sense, but the general idea is that once a year each person draws an iron and the name on the iron becomes the person they are paired with most intently that year, the person they should love above others and save first should there be some disaster. There is also a blank iron and if you draw that no one has you as their particular love for that whole entire year. You are starved of affection. What is initially presented as a way of levelling out the natural desire to love one person differently to another becomes a way of measuring and apportioning love which becomes as unjust. Why not love more than one person with equal intensity but different expression? Rather than fairness, it brings about hierarchy and cruelty. And as one of the daughters notices, it is also a game that is easily rigged, using the ritual to cement a parent’s greater love for one child over another. All of the rituals have this eery duality, suggesting sense, practicality, necessity whilst delivering suffering and abuse. It feels as if the girls could have no hope of making sense of the world or of forging relationships with other people with these rules and rituals as their guides for love and life.

So the novel is certainly intriguing and though I didn’t entirely fall in love with The Water Cure, I would definitely be interested in reading another novel by Sophie Mackintosh.

A dystopian novel likened to The Handmaid’s Tale will set high expectations for any book, and the Man Booker nominated The Water Cure, is no exception.
The book tells the tale of three sisters, whose parents have removed them from society to live on an island, where they must constantly undergo tests of ‘survival’ and of their love for each other. The family also take in abused women, and is seemingly a haven for them, though clearly all is not what it seems and when men arrive on the shore the sisters must fight for survival.
It is difficult to give an outline of this book very simply because what happens within it is so vague. We don’t really know why the girls are here, or what is happening in the rest of society – though there is a suggestion that some kind of contamination, disease or illness may, possibly the cause of this ‘post-apocalypse’. Yet as the novel progresses the reader may very well find themselves wondering whether that world really exists at all.
Equally, while it is very evident that the girls are suffering horrific abuse, the vague and dreamlike nature of the narrative makes it difficult to really pin down what is happening to them, or why. In some ways, you could argue that the reader knows no more than the girls themselves, however, even for such an incredibly short novel, this lack of awareness becomes difficult to sustain.
The plot of the novel is minimal, and by the end of the book it is easy to be left wondering what the point was, or what has been achieved over the course of less than 300 pages. Much of the narrative is simply a bleak and unrelenting repetition of the horror the girls are subjected to and what they have been taught to inflict upon themselves. The narrative style is interesting, flitting between the united voices of the sisters and two of the sisters first person narratives.
The concept for the novel had huge appeal and the faults lie less with the idea than the execution – the world Mackintosh creates captures the reader enough for them to want more from it. Her characters and the lives they live are stories that need to be told, but unfortunately Mackintosh’s efforts fall short.

The main story of this book is 3 sisters living in an abandoned hotel/retreat with their parents and they have to be protected from the outside world at all costs. We are led to believe something terrible has happened outside the border - death? Disease? But we are never told what. It brings up interesting points about love, parenting and how far you would go to protect family. The 3 sisters who have no understanding of a “normal” world are made to believe that men are evil. They believe everything they have been told and taught by their parents. Who in flashback it is hinted that they were trying to build a female only utopia. But danger is always lurking.
Things get really interesting when 3 male outsiders wash up on the shore.
Hauntingly captivating. The story flows and the pages melt away. So intriguing. One of those books you can’t put down. I needed to know what happened next. But I still have so many questions. I guess this is a book that needs to be revisited, but will it give up its secrets? I can’t put my finger on why I loved this dark and odd book so much, but I did. Thank you Netgalley for this copy.

This is a very odd story, full of dreamy intense heat filled days but with a nightmarish undercurrent of horror and abuse. Three sisters live with their mother in a remote hotel, accessible only by boat. Their father has recently left, taking one of their boats and hasn't returned. Their lives are full of strange rituals that they believe will keep them safe from danger especially from men and diseases. These are all very vague as the sisters haven't ever left and seen the outside world. Their mother is very controlling and emotionally abusive. Presently some men arrive after their boat capsizes and the sisters have to adjust to their presence.

I would recommend this book as the writing is excellent and the claustrophobic atmosphere is very well drawn. It is certainly not a light read though.

A really hard book to rate. Some of It I loved: I found the book really atmospheric and chilling and mysterious...

But ultimately that mysterious feel left me too often wondering what on earth was going on!

Style and substance a plenty. A book very very open to individual readers interpretations and I imagine the literary lovers will have a field day dissecting chapter after chapter.

I think I’d really need to read 2 or 3 times to try and make sense of what was happening and I left those days behind in school!

A book I’d discuss with others to work out WTF was going on at times!

Worthy? yes, very much so.

Enjoyable? My own personal jury is out.

On paper this book looked like it would be right up my street.. dystopian-type setting with an intrigue premise but while the writing was beautifully sparse (more is implied than is explicitly described, particularly with some of the more disturbing themes) something about this book just did not work for me and I can't quite put my finger on why. I did not feel connected to any of the characters and while the author explored the mental and physical effects of an abusive cult-like lifestyle on the girls in an interesting way I found it a little predictable and it felt like a story that has been told many times before and it ultimately left me feeling cold. Having said that the writing is so strong I will definitely look out for more from this author in the future as this is an impressive debut novel but it was just not for me. Thanks to Netgalley and Penguin Books (UK) for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

THE WATER CURE by Sophie Mackintosh

I was intrigued when I first saw an email from NetGalley inviting me to read this book. Could it be the same Sophie Mackintosh I once met at her university, and performed with in a surreal, one-off performance of a play written by our friends and taking place in someone's student accommodation? I have only vague memories of it and I doubt Sophie remembers at all, but full disclosure: yep, same Sophie.

It seems apt, then, that when reading her debut novel The Water Cure, you feel as if you're constantly hampered by a veil, a net curtain, something blocking you. You're underwater perhaps, and everything's a bit murky. Mackintosh arranges things exactly as she wants them, and you are granted knowledge only when she wants you to have it. There is no second-guessing of plot here. I shall talk very little about plot in this review because you do need to read it and unpeel the onion she creates for yourself. Take everything at face value, but be aware it might all fall away...

There are three sisters, this we know from fairly on. They are isolated and live with their mother and no other people. Their only contact is with each other. Their father left for the mainland some time ago - there are hints about toxins in the air, special preparations have to be made each time he leaves to get provisions - but he hasn't come back. We don't know what might have happened to the rest of the world to cause it to be so polluted, or why the island the sisters inhabit was somehow spared. It's drummed in to us that men are bad, and only King (the name they use for the father) is to be trusted.

We learn that the unusually spacious accommodation the women seem to reside in was formerly some kind of shelter or sanctuary for women. It's implied - nothing is concrete in this novel - that either the catastrophic event on the mainland stopped the women from coming, or that the shelter stopped serving its purpose. We don't know.

The novel is divided in to various chapters, each headed usually by the name of one of the sisters, or we are to understand, in the third person. Seemingly interjected are notes from the mother, in italics. This was my understanding of how each voice was introduced and it may be wrong, but it added to the fluidity of the narrative. Nothing got stale as we see events from different perspectives. Everything we know is challenged and unreliable gatekeepers are, by the end, mostly discovered and clarified. I believe the novel ends neatly but not unrealistically so. The tale is told.

The novel is longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and the shortlist will be announced on 20/09/18.

This book was different from my usual read and that’s why I wanted to read it. Sometimes I find myself drawn to the same types of books so by reading this I was leaving my comfort zone.

The story of a father called King and his wife bringing up his 3 children on an Island away from the mainland and everything toxic!! Sometimes women appear damaged with tales of abuse, violence but mysteriously leave the Island cured.

It is beautifully written and very atmospheric, at times it is brutal and violent but mesmerising at the same time.

Thank you to Netgalley for a copy in exchange for my review.

The Water Cure is beautifully written, visceral in a way that reminded me of The Edible Woman with an ethereal quality to build the isolated, dream-like atmosphere of the women's island.

Despite the slow pace of the book, I found myself oddly addicted to it, getting sucked into the cult-like nature of Grace, Lia and Sky's world. Partly this is down to the mystery of the story and whether we are to believe the tales their mother and King tell them or not, and partly this is down to the unreliable narrative voices guiding us through the novel. Because while these are women whose bodies are kept frail and weak, their minds and personalities are still their own - as shown through the multiple perspectives, which allow us to delve into their own voices.

A stunning, entrancing debut - can't wait for more from this author.

Straight away I knew something wasn’t right with this set up. It almost had a cult like feel to it. The various traditions and therapies the family partake it are not by any stretch of the imagination ‘normal’.

This book almost has a coming of age feel about it but not in the traditional sense as the girls have been so sheltered all their lives. Their childlike innocence is a stark contrast with their parents motives and it’s almost heart breaking that the girls believe the numerous ‘therapies’ their parents subject them to is in their minds just part of normal every day life.

Throughout the book there is mention of a time when other women used to come to the island to receive ‘the water cure’. However, it is never really explained why these woman don’t visit anymore. There are lots of other point’s that are never really full explained either, like why are the men bad? Is the world actually contaminated? Are their parents just delusional cult leaders?

I’ve read so many good things about this book, however, I feel like I may have just missed the point. Maybe it was the author’s intention to leave us purposefully in the dark about so many issues to leave us in the same position the girls would have been in. For me though, I personally prefer a book that if it is shrouded in mystery, as this one was, that there are enough clues or information for me as the reader to piece together the answers I want to finish the book having.

All in all though this is a haunting book with some beautiful prose. Despite much ambiguity, which i’m sure was intentional, I did enjoy the authors writing and it would not put me off reading any of her future work.