This is not a book I would normally go for. So when I was given the opportunity to read this I thought I would give it a go. It is of a ghostly, eerie kind of boom with 3 ladies - Liia, Grace and Sky. I felt really protective of them that I wanted to protect them and keep them safe throughout their battles.
This certainly sounds how sisterhood should be.
This book will not be to everyone's taste but it's worth giving it a go.

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Books UK for giving me the opportunity to read this book in exchange for my honest unbiased review

Clever, ambiguous and haunting and it’s beautifully written. Builds good tension as the story unravels. Yet somehow it’s hard to root for any characters and it feels unoriginal/hackneyed at times perhaps? Still a really decent read.

Fantastic book - echoes of Lord of the Flies, 1984, King Lear and The Handmaid's Tale but somehow entirely of itself. In order to survive does the end always justify the means? A beautifully written novel about a dystopian existence in a maybe not too distant future(or recent past), an existence which the protagonists believe to be the best available.

The Water Cure is the debut novel of Sophie Mackintosh and has, at the time of my writing, been long listed for the 2018 Man Booker Prize, and deservedly so.

It is the story of…I don’t know. A sect? Refuge? Retreat? Cult? Fantasy? A failed utopia in a supposedly dystopian world? All of the above and then some…I think. I do not know what genre fits it…mystery mixed with philosophy perhaps. It is definitely the story of three sisters raised in isolation from the toxic outside world with rituals to protect, cleanse and heal. Anymore detail and I will spoil it for you.

Told in the voices of Grace, Lia and Sky (a device I especially love), it is written in the present tense, which I find always heightens the reader’s awareness of a character’s emotions and creates a sense of urgency. It also makes the reader feel involved.

This is not a quick “beach book” though I did read it quickly as I did not want to be away from it. The prose is beautiful, atmospheric with not a single word wasted. It is highly evocative; I held my breath at times to be silent. Light, ethereal, ghostly yet oh, so dark and menacing. Beautiful yet violent. Calm yet seething. Ms Mackintosh’s writing will hold you spellbound and leave you bereft, hopeful, defeated…just as the sisters felt. She is a skilled wordsmith indeed.

A small aside…after reading the book and then re-reading the publisher’s blurb I wondered if they had read the same book!

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin for the Advanced Reader Copy of the book, which I have voluntarily reviewed.

I'm afraid I just couldn't finish this book. It started out interestingly enough - of the three sisters and their mother always referred to as 'mother' and then they are on the island, alone with those men. I have nothing good to say about this book and like my mother once told me, if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.

This was a very intense book- and the most confusing novels I have ever read this year.

The start of it made me feel like being damaged by a man, being left, lovesick. You know when you get heart ache you feel your family is the one and only place you can get unconditional love, no matter what you are. Then it started getting confusing altogether.

My first issue with the novel was the point of view. It was multiple, but after one point it fixed on Lia for ages. I felt the need to switch between Lia and Grace rather than getting stuck in Lia -which felt needy and teenager-like, but I guess that was the intention. And Sky: why was she in this book. Just another girl? What was her role.

I really enjoyed the first half of the book. It was an eerie-tale. Dark, obsessive. Mackintosh's imagination blew me away. The practices of 'water cure' are so similar with things happening to girls all around the world. In some countries girls get slapped when they get their first period bleeding. This is to ensure they become obeying, dutiful wives. Some people banish women from their houses during menstrual bleeding. So I totally get the point in Mackintosh's dystopian world. And I was ready to give a fat 4 stars but then things got confusing. I was lost after 80% of the book. Sudden, action packed ending with a few flashbacks that weren't enough for my thirst of knowing. I would have preferred a more vague ending- because what has been revealed isn't and won't be satisfying to a tale like that. The dreaminess of the first half was clouded by the end-reveal for me.

I agree that it is Virgin Suicides meets Handmaid's Tale- and in some bits I swear I could see Mackintosh winking to Angela Carter- the red velvet and wolf etc. (Highlighted on my kindle!)

A brilliantly realised feminist dystopia exploring the themes of love and cruelty. Set on an unnamed island, three sisters and their mother try to survive after the death of their father. The tone is controlled and the language fresh and exciting. The Water Cure deserves its place on the longlist for the Booker Prize. An amazing novel.

Life is toxic. Men are toxic. Grace, Lia and Sky are safe on their island habitat, protected by their environment and the 'therapies' their father and mother make them undertake. They have no understanding of life beyond their immediate surroundings - except for the danger outwith; no knowledge of aeroplanes, technology, or the development of a woman. King, the father, has died and it is for the mother to raise the girls safely. When three other males arrive, what will the impact be on the girls and their environment?

Chilling and sometimes creepy, this is a fascinating and thought-provoking read. Well recommended.

"I will tell her that all of this has been an awakening, this fever dream, this discovery."

The Booker longlisted The Water Cure starts with an intriguing set up: three girls on an isolated island, deliberately cut off by their parents from contact with the outside world, and subject to strange cures and therapies.

The strength of this section is that it is open to so many different, and resonant, explanations. The following are ones I noticed, or were brought to my attention by other reviewers. Almost all of them seem arguably present in the text (see tbw quotes) and in interviews the author seems happy to acknowledge them as potentially valid readings. These include:

A literal manifestation of toxic masculinity:

"They let the toxic words fall out of their mouths with no care for what they could do to her.
...
I became allergic to my husband. He refused to acknowledge how sick he was making me. He told me I was making it up, that it wasn’t possible, even when I coughed up blood, when my hair stopped up the plughole."

Ecological disaster:

"One of us daughters always fainted. Sometimes it was two or all of us. When that happened, King would become agitated. ‘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?’"

A response to the election of a President who boasts about pussy grabbing and comments on his own daughter's sex appeal:

"I didn’t understand how rapidly things had changed, how all that had been needed was permission for everything to go to shit, and that permission had been granted. I didn’t know that there was no longer any need for the men to hold their bodies in check or to carry on the lie that we mattered."

A world where victims of male violence are blamed (e.g. the recent Northern Irish case), and where women are taught they must dress and behave in certain ways to remain safe:

"Refrain of the man, universal: This is not my fault!

See also: I absolve myself of responsibility.

And: I never said that. You can’t take the actions of my body as words."

Patriarchal survivalist cults ...

"You explained to me, one day when we were alone, when Mother was somewhere below, probably taking a nap: you had saved all you could. That is, we had proved ourselves the only ones worth saving."

... with complicit matriachal support:

"More than that, she was a woman at our father’s side, absorbing and refining his theories.

She had been behind the more sadistic therapies. Whether she truly believed in being cruel to be kind, or whether she just secretly hated us, reminders of what it meant to be younger and more beautiful, I cannot quite decide."

Abusive parents manipulating inter-sibling relationships:

"All of us put our arms around her and told her that of course we would still love her, of course, but we knew it wouldn’t be the same, that she would have to scramble more for the affection, that it wouldn’t come as easily. We wouldn’t be able to touch her so freely. You picked me, as usual, tying me to you for another year. You rigged it. The whole thing was a sham."

The dynamics between sisters in a large family:

"‘Sometimes,’ Mother tells us, when she is trying to be loving, ‘I can no longer tell you girls apart.’ Some days we like this, some days we don’t.
...
I say a prayer while wondering how I could ever have thought that we were two parts of the same person."

Overprotective parents keeping children in fearful ignorance:

"Why should I, it wasn’t something that had been laid out for me yet, it wasn’t necessary information. ‘Sometimes it’s better not to know,’ said Mother. At the time, that was good enough for me."

Women's violent revenge for generations of abuse by men (cf Naomi Alderman's The Power):

"The anger of the women seemed a force from outside them. It was an anger that welled up deep in their chests. Without it, they would not have been able to survive. I personally have always welcomed it. The moments of power. The burning in my stomach."

Borders - seemingly an obligatory criteria for this year's Booker:

"I will never come further than this from my home, I will never be a person who crosses the border. I will never leave my sisters again."

Victorian times where women underwent (often forced and typically medically dubious) treatment in sanitoriums for conditions such as hysteria:

"We are lucky, because we have been exposed to minimal damage. We remember what those women looked like when they came to us. But we also remember the effect the therapies had on them. How their bodies strengthened until they were finally ready to undergo the water cure.
...
Inventing a new therapy always put him in an expansive, joyful mood."

And to add a personal one, the potential later risks of sending my three daughters to all-girls school until the age of 18:

"‘I know what it’s like to be a young woman,’ she tells us. ‘I know all about what can destroy you.’ We wait for her to tell us more. ‘It’s natural, what you’re feeling,’ she says, addressing me specifically this time. ‘It’s natural to want to look.’ Grace laughs, a short laugh. ‘Stop it, Grace,’ Mother tells her. She squeezes our hands tighter.

The men are somewhere inside, I don’t know where. In our corridors, breathing our air. Sitting in our furniture, leaving their trace. ‘You need a love therapy ,’ she tells us."

And echoes of Shakespeare (King Lear, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream)

The weakness of this section is arguably that they can't all be there, that perhaps Mackintosh has created too blank a slate and left too much to the reader.

This criticism is perhaps most valid with the Shakespeare comparisons - comparisons the author herself has acknowledged: one needs more than an eccentric man on an island with three daughters whose love he manipulates to make this a Tempest/ King Lear mash-up.

But in many respects my problem with The Water Cure was the opposite. The ambiguity and wide potential interpretation was impressive, but I wish the novel had stopped there, as a novella (c.f. the quite brilliant MBI shortlisted Fever Dream).

Instead the 2nd section, narrated from one sister's perspective, which describes what happened when three men arrive, rather dragged and added little for me, indeed perhaps detracted.

And the closing section, while bringing the book to a suitable end, seemed to be unneccsarily reliant on some reveals that might have been better left for readers to deduce or imagine.

But then of course as a novella, unlike apparently graphic novels, far-fetched steampunk, poor crime fiction and poetry, it wouldn't have been Booker eligible.

2.5 stars rounded up to 3 for the 4.5 star novella it might have been.

The Water Cure is set on an island in a post-apocalyptic near future. Three sisters, Grace, Lia and Sky live in a health spa hotel with their mother and King, their stepfather. Their guests are all damaged women, seeking cures from the sun and radiation and other horrors of the mainland. The radiation has not reached the island, offering the family a refuge from the horrors of the real world.

And one day King dies. And three men arrive from the mainland. And mother disappears.

This feels like a transposition of a 19th Century Irish manners novel into another era. The sisters might as well have been living in the big house, an Anglo-Irish family refusing to fraternise with the servants and sheltering from the growing rebellion outside the gates. The girls are expected to engage in all sorts of treatments and cures - the rituals and manners of the aristocracy - to protect them from the coarseness of the men in the fields. Then, in the season of their debut, they are expected to transform from children into wives.

And just like the manners novels, we find ourselves thrown into a maelstrom of sibling rivalry; we find the blend of excitement and terror at being cut loose into adulthood; we find power games between young women and red blooded men.

For the first section, before the men arrive, the narration switches often between Lia and Grace - with some sections narrated in third person - and it is intriguing. This, to be fair, is the time when it still seemed we were in a dystopian future and the novel was to be about the world that had been created rather than a character study supposed to reflect a universal and severe family. Then, when the men show up, the pace changes and the line between fantasy/dream and reality blurs. The narrative focus shifts only occasionally and the pace slows to a crawl - ironically since the characters seem to do a lot of running around for its own sake. There is a really repetitive feel; it is stated over and over again that the sisters must not touch the men for fear of contamination, yet still they are driven to touch. By the end of this section, it is no longer terribly clear what is happening at all; there are violent thoughts and violent acts but it feels pretty directionless. The ending is the pretty much inevitable conclusion that everything has been slowly working up to.

I am sure some people will like this book. Read at a simplistic level, it could be taken as a battle of the sexes. The isolation of the women could be seen as a uber-feminist kind of utopia - except that the women don't seem happy with it and still live under the shadow of King. And I am sure some readers will be able to find a climate change angle to fit with their world view. Maybe I wilfully read this to fit in with my fascination with Irish politics. So maybe it is a bit of a universal truth template just waiting for readers to overlay their own personal agenda.

The trouble is, as a template it is probably a bit of an imperfect, forced fit. And in its own rights, it is all a bit confusing and unevenly paced.

This one really wasn't for me at all and originally I did stop at 39% and it was going to be a DNF.
But I decided to persevere and forced myself to finish. Hoping it would get better.
I’m sorry to say for me it didn’t.
So although on paper this seemed a good fit for me in actuality it just wasn't.
I have seen reviews on "The Wate Cure" praising the brilliance of the prose and yes while I do agree the language used here had an almost fluid brilliance to it it still for me fell flat in capturing and then retaining my complete attention.
I don't mind admitting I felt a little lost in my overall comprehension here and while scratching my head still in confusion at a third in I decided enough was enough.
That was when I decided to down tools before later reconsidering as I just didn’t want to be beaten by this.
I really didn't have the foggiest most of the time what the deal was here and if I'm honest I was bored and couldn't be bothered to stay the course and find out really.
It was my sheer bloody determination that got me through this.
I am if I'm honest slightly disappointed as the blurb for this was ever so intriguing but In my opinion, this was spoiled by attempting to be too highbrow in its execution keeping me in an unnecessary state of confusion that for me rather than making me want to know more just did the complete opposite.
I don’t know what I expected from this but this sure wasn’t it.
Maybe I'm just not clever enough to truly appreciate “The Water Cure"
I read to escape and this was just too much like hard work for me.
I'm sure there are others who will absolutely adore this strange dystopian type drama I'm just really not one of them sorry.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of "The Water Cure" of which I have reviewed voluntary.
All opinions expressed are entirely my own.

I think this is the type of book that requires reading twice. I spent much of my first read through feeling confused about what was happening which I personally don't find intriguing as a reader, however I'm sure others might.

This is one of those novels where the blurb does not give you a particularly in depth or detailed description of what the novel contains. Admittedly I was drawn in by the similarities that were mentioned between The Handmaid’s Tale and The Virgin Suicides and I thought it seemed like something different to what I normally read, and I love The Handmaid’s Tale so I had quite high hopes.
Honestly I just don’t think this novel was for me. I’ve seen many others have really enjoyed it; both other bloggers, and people I speak to in work. It just didn’t work for me!
The plot had quite a few holes in it, I understand that there is an air of mystery around the novel, as we are not sure what has happened to the world, and we are just not sure what is true. However, there just was too much confusion around too many things for me to really get a grip on the novel, Even at the end of the novel nothing was much clearer, and honestly I questioned why I had bothered reading the novel at all, as I ended with more questions and confusion than I started with.
The novel is narrated in turn by the three sisters, although Lia does the most narrating. I quite liked how unreliable all the narrators were, and how quite often what they had said would be contradicted or completely falsified by what a sister said in the next chapter. However, the unreliability became wearing when nothing was ever clarified or explained at all.
Unfortunately I also found the novel to be quite predictable. As soon as the men turned up, things went almost exactly as I thought they might, and that was quite disappointing. I wanted more tension and more twists and turns, which would have helped elevate what is quite a dark and sombre novel into something more.

Very well-written and atomspheric yet at the same time, I'm not 100% sure what actually happened or what the point of it was. What was the significance of all the italicised paragraphs, reporting what happened to the women of the wider world at the hands of men? I felt it *almost* made a link between modern-day society and the Me Too era but not quite. I didn't enjoy it exactly (but I don't think that was the author's aim) but it pulled me through, and for such a literary title with little plot, it was a surprisingly compelling read.

On a small island, three daughters come to terms with the death of their father, known as The King, and the future where none of them – including their mother – can go to the mainland for supplies in case they become infected.
In this dystopian future, disease is everywhere and men are the carriers. It is all the three girls – Lia, Grace and Sky – know and it means when two men and a boy wash up on the beach by their home they are full of fear, but also – for one of them – wonder.
To say the three are unhappy doesn’t really describe their situation. They have known nothing else. But they are unsatisfied. Their life is a series of rituals to keep the sickness at bay and, as an outsider, it is strange to read and harder still to understand because Mackintosh doesn’t tell you what went before, how Lia, Grace and Sky ended up living in this remote place, and what they really remember of their life before.
What you do see is a mother and farther who are either mad or evil or maybe a bit of both, making the book an uncomfortable read at times. In fact, quite a lot of it the story made me uncomfortable, the way men are portrayed, for example, though I think this is very much in line with the genre, because they are so two-dimensional, but – more than that – the way the women treat each other in ways that borders on cruel. There is no idea of female solidarity, no idea of making a better world, not until the very end.
Because of this, I am left in two minds about the book. I liked a lot about it – the way Mackintosh writes is otherworldly and perfectly suited to this other world I found myself in. The picture she paints at the beginning of the book is stark and startling and I liked that. I also liked that, as the story unfolds, so much is not how it seems.
What I didn’t like is that, in so many ways, the story didn’t go anywhere. I wanted a ‘moment’, something that would leave me shocked, or stunned, or left with deep thoughts that rattled round my head for weeks, the effect I get when I read a book by Margaret Atwood say. And I didn’t get that. It’s probably unfair to compare the two authors and I’m trying not to but this book had shades of the Handmaid’s Tale and I couldn’t help myself. Which leaves me liking, but not loving the book.

Grace, Lia and Sky are on an island with their mother. Their father, referred to as King, has gone missing. The girls have been raised to believe that men are dangerous, and toxic to women, except King, who has renounced the ways of other men. To stay safe within the boundaries that have been created by King, the girls must undertake certain rituals, which are often cruel. When 2 men and a boy are washed ashore soon after King’s disappearance, it challenges what the girls know about love and possession, and the world that King, and their mother, has created around them.

The writing in the Water Cure is beautifully hypnotic and ethereal. I really feel that the cover art captures it so well - there is a glimpse of something on the surface, but there is much we can’t see, and which is hinted at. And in this book there are many things that are hinted at and never outrightly said. It is left to the reader to join the dots.

Though the story is often dark and cruel, there are also gentle flashes of humour which bring the novel into the present. A request for water responded to with an outstretched arm to the sea, ‘Knock yourself out.’ The girls must meditate on a word. ‘What’s the word?’ requests Lia. ‘Tramadol.’

This book reminded me of Census by Jesse Ball in that it requires a certain effort on the part of the reader. We need to imagine this world we are transported to, we need to suspend our disbelief, and imagine the answers to our unanswered questions; Where are we? When? What has happened to the world?
And I think readers who put in that effort will find that Lia, Sky and Grace stay in your mind long after the book is closed.

I've heard a lot about this book so was very keen to read it. However, I was disappointed.

The narrative feels too familiar in a current book market saturated by dystopian feminist literature. Mackintosh's book revisits themes of reproduction, women's bodies and male control that have been explored many times before.

I liked the style of writing and format of the prose. The mother was a really interesting character and the nuances of the relationship between the sisters were elegantly explored.

Unfortunately, the book felt slow and laboured to me and was unable to sustain my interest.

A sumptuous, claustrophobic, hallucinogenic read. Incredibly intense, it felt alot like Emma Cline's The Girls (which I loved) in tone. Mackintosh's use of language is powerful and lyrical, I was very pleasantly surprised thast she managed to sustain the tone for the full book. Not many writers would be able to do this.

Whilst I admired the general lack of backstory and explanation, there was perhaps room for a little more of it. I think I would have been rather lost if I had not read up on some reviews and blurbs before reading.

That said, I thoroughly enjoyed losing myself in this lush and hypnotic world and I will be keeping a lookout for whatever Sophie Mackintosh writes next.

I’ve been watching Season 2 of the The Handmaid’s Tale and feel like I could do with some therapy, myself. (Side note: If you’ve started and are ready to give up, persist until at least episode 6, and then see how you feel).

The Water Cure is written in a similar way to The Handmaid’s Tale, in that it’s a first-person narrative which passes from daughter to daughter but you never quite get the full picture. Until you do, and then you kind of wish you hadn’t…

It’s seriously disturbing and very well written. This is the kind of book that you finish reading, shiver a little, and peek outside your window… just to check.

Beautifully written debut which is perfectly timed with the new series of The Handmaid's Tale. With the naive point of view of three sisters, it twists and turns as it reveals some disturbing truths. I guessed a couple of the twists but it didn't spoil it. Highly recommended.