A dystopian novel about three sisters - Grace, Lia and Sky. It leaves the reader with a lot of unanswered questions about why the girls have been removed from the rest of the world.

I read the novel greedily and fiercely in one sitting! I know the book will stay with me for a long time and I will definitely be re-reading at least once. I was mesmerised from the opening page and the tale of sisterhood, dark secrets and the very essence of womanhood evoked something in me I haven’t felt since I read “The Virgin Suicides.” The book was so well written and drew you into a world that simultaneously felt realistic and of another time and place. Almost indescribably good, this is a triumphant debut and I can’t wait to read what comes next.

This hypnotic read left me with more questions than answers and was profoundly intelligent.

How do we love safely? How do we trust one another? How do we control emotions? How do we manipulate the truth? How does consent manifest itself? How does gender define role? How much is too much?

I am not entirely convinced that it was strictly speaking a dystopian novel. We are led to believe that men specifically carry a virus or bacteria that is harmful to women specifically, but I wasn't convinced. I believe there was an outbreak of sorts, which potentially affected women more keenly or was transmitted through sexual contact. But I think the danger was exaggerated by King and used as a ploy to isolate a group of vulnerable individuals and abuse them - both physically and mentally - at his will.

It has touches of many other books - Hot Milk, The Handmaid's Tale, Lord Of The Flies, The Virgin Suicides, Gather The Daughters, The Natural Way Of Things, The Girls - whilst being completely disparate at the same time, which is a beautiful accomplishment.

P.S. This book is going to be huge, so read it and form your own opinion (and questions!)

--- Blog post scheduled for 30 May ---

Grace, Lia and Sky have been taught by their parents to fear men. Their father, King, has taken them to an isolated location and has surrounded the area with barbed wire and has put buoys out in the water. He doesn’t want anyone to enter, nor does he want his daughters to leave. The world outside of their safe haven has become a violent one, with men turning against women. The women in the outside world are growing ill from the toxins of that world and sometimes make it to their shores where the sisters’ mother gives the ill women the water cure. Grace, Lia and Sky all undergo therapies to keep them safe. Their father and mother are obeyed without question. But when King disappears, two men and a young boy wash ashore. The sisters have no way of knowing whether they will survive this new threat.

I’m amazed that this is the author’s debut novel. She has the heart of a poet. This book reads like a fairy tale, the kind that sends chills up your spine. The life of these sisters just broke my heart. The rituals and therapies they were forced to endure were without doubt cruel ones and it’s unclear as to their purpose throughout most of the book. The author creates an atmosphere of constant tension and unease. While some of the ending didn’t come as a surprise to me, there were points when I was quite taken back by revelations. All questions aren’t answered but that didn’t matter a bit to me. It’s a book that I will long remember and I’m sure it’s headed for quite a few literary prizes.

Hauntingly beautiful and most highly recommended.

I can’t remember seeing a more perfect cover for a book in a while. Everything you need to know about The Water Cure is there. The obscure water hiding all manner of unknowable things. The girl vulnerable, head lifted, neck exposed. The fleshiness, with the female body at the centre of everything. The unanswered questions. The spare and stark simplicity of it.

This is a book of atmosphere, rather than action. It reminds me a lot of Deborah Levy’s wonderful Hot Milk. The writing is similarly poetic, and it blisters with all the same drowsy heat and psychological instability. Added to that is an atmosphere of stagnation and decay. Things that have been still too long. “The tomatoes, nearer the house, have taken on a life of their own. Their fruit falls and attracts stinging insects. A jam of dirt, overblown globs and seeds.”

The three girls at the centre of The Water Cure have taken on a life of their own too.

Their mother and King, their father, keep them isolated in a huge house on an island. They’re kept away from the dangerous men and toxins of the rest of the world, and subjected to numerous damaging “cures,” like “The Drowning Game” or “Love Therapy.” At the start of the novel King disappears, and not long afterwards, their mother does too. The girls are left to interpret the world themselves, through the hazy filter of what they’ve been taught.

The book starts from the unusual perspective of all three sisters together, thinking and narrating in unison, like a siren song. Their perspectives soon separate as everything descends towards a feminist Lord of the Flies.

It’s been presented as a near-future dystopia, but so much of it could be from the present day. The Water Cure itself: a Google search for the term finds people still following the discredited advice of some quack promoting water and salt cures. The attitude of men: in one description of the outside world, someone says: “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.” — The election of Donald Trump springs to mind. Emotional toxins: the girls have been taught that, “Trauma is a toxin that hooks into our hair and organs and blood and becomes part of us, the way heavy metals do, our bodies nothing more than a layering of flesh around everything ingested and experienced.” A yoga teacher has said something similar to me recently.

This could be present day or future, the dangers real or imagined; the truth is slippery here and ungraspable. The obscurity of it all is at once frustrating and admirable. Nothing is fully spelled out and the margin for interpretation is wide: you are submerged in their world to either sink or swim. I like that, but while I admire the author for keeping us in the dark, there are points where I can't quite believe the characters wouldn’t have more curiosity about each other. It undermines the effect slightly.

But one thing emerges from the murky depths in full clarity, and that’s loneliness. The sisters, who start so close they think as one, have had a wedge driven between them. The natural sisterly love/hate dynamic is exaggerated by their circumstances to breaking point, and leaves them isolated. The middle sister, Lia, epitomises the loneliness most acutely. Although she blames herself even for that: “Every time I think I am very lonely, it becomes bleaker and more true. You can think things into being. You can dwell them up from the ground.” And as her older sister, Grace, says: “Sudden love, when gifted to a habitually unloved person, can induce nausea. It can become a thing you would claw and debase yourself for.”

Like the girl on the cover, alone in that cloudy sea of blue. She could be looking around for help, for her sisters, for just anyone to share the world with. And its an immersive experience, at once uncomfortable and intriguing, to see what she finds.

An eerie read that left me with more questions than answers, The Water Cure is set away from the mainland and follows three sisters trying to make sense of their world. Influenced by their abusive mother and father, the story is unreliable and dark. Descriptions of their home and environment were rich and poetic at times, and I could easily identify with the strong bonds of sisterhood.

I enjoyed this book but would have liked to have known more about the back story to help enrich the characters. I also wanted to know more about the mainland compared to the 'island' to make sense of how they came to be there.

I've seen a lot of reviews about this book, and so I started reading with some trepidation. But it is not the confusing mess it has been made out to be. It is a beautiful, lyrical story of women, women who know intimately the violence of men.

The bond between women, the sisterhood, is a powerful force. In The Water Cure, we have three sisters who are bonded so tightly they are almost one. The author delves into important feminist themes, and one of the most interesting is the relationship between mothers and daughters. How wide is the gap between love and envy?

I would liken this book to The Handmaid's Tale, which seems an obvious comparison, but it is in the same style. So much is weaved between the pages, so many themes and underlying truths. The prose is beautiful, the story captivating. Read it.

This book.

It is so very difficult to describe this book, which is I think one of the reasons why the blurb is so vague. This is the story of three sisters, growing up on an island with their parents where something is obviously not quite right but many things remain vague for the whole book. It is never clear whether the stories their parents tell them of the rest of the world are true or not. I personally adored this vagueness and the hypnotic and introspective way this story unfolds.

Sophie Mackintosh’s prose is lush and evocative; her sentences are breathtakingly beautiful and she spins her metaphors in such a brilliant way. Imagery of water is threaded through the whole book, changing meaning and implication depending on the narrator and the context. I adored that.

The author plays with voices and perspectives in a way that I obviously loved. I am a big fan of stories told, at least in parts, in a “we-“perspective and Mackintosh wields that difficult voice expertly. She switches perspectives in just the right moments and allows her narrators to be unreliable without loosing authenticity.

At the heart, this is a story about sisters (nobody is surprised that I love that) and their disfunctional relationship. The way in which flashbacks into their childhoods were integrated is brilliant and effortless and left me always wanting more while being able to fill in some blanks myself – I love it when authors trust me enough to do just that. I found the parts that examined their love and the way their parents broke them to be by far the strongest, whereas the storyline with the men washed ashore did not always work for me.

I thought that the pacing in the middle dragged a little, but the beginning and the ending were pitch-perfect. I cannot wait to see what Sophie Mackintosh does next, because I will definitely reading it.

First sentence: “First we have a father, but our father dies without us noticing.”

This is, in my opinion, a mind bending book. I've read it, enjoyed it and still don't know where or when it is set. You get very little idea of the world at large. The women are isolated, and the isolation comes across strongly, in the way the book is presented. It took me a chapter or two to get into it - it's totally different to the 'usual' way of writing a book, but once I made the switch in my mind I couldn't put it down and read it in one sitting.

Loved it.

'The Water Cure' is a story of three sisters, an island and the men who shatter their solitary way of living. This is a beautiful, strange, singular book, reminiscent of the style of Shirley Jackson and Angela Carter. The writing is lyrical and holds you at arms distance, revealing key elements of the plot in dribs and drabs yet ensuring you're utterly engrossed while reading it. I adored its portrayal of first love - the obsessiveness of it and how it can set you aflame yet utterly destroy you all at the same time. I've heard a few reviewers describe it as being 'dreamlike' which is a very accurate description. Sophie Mackintosh deserves all the plaudits which are coming to her.

Title: The Water CureThe Water Cure

Author: Sophie Mackintosh

From the back: 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.

The gist: What a beautiful, dark book. It reads a little like you’re floating. Somewhere between being caught in a heat haze and drowning in a slightly cloudy yard pool. There’s something delicate about this book, something ever-so-slightly ethereal. And yet, something dark and unnerving.

It’s not a book with hard edges – it’s not something you’ll enjoy if you love joined up endings and matter-of-face plotlines. But if your reading tipple is composed of beautifully poetic prose, writing that lets you fill in the gaps (or leave them there) then this is for you.

It’s a dark, playful exploration of growing up, of being a girl, and of control with a haunting quality that will stay with you long after you finish it.

And if you needed any other reasons to read it; it has strains of Margaret Atwood, of The Virgin Suicides, and of Dogtooth.

[Interlude: if you haven’t seen Dogtooth I highly recommend it. It’s a darkly surreal Greek film, and on my top ten list]

Others have called the book ‘odd’ – and I agree. It’s odd like ‘the fascinating trinket you find in the back of a drawer.’ It’s odd like ‘the dream you can only just remember when you wake up.’ It’s odd like ‘have you seen the news recently?’

And, most interestingly – it’s uncomfortable, which is almost always a good thing.

Favourite line: We are lucky, because we have been exposed to minimal damage.

Read if: You want to feel like you stood up a bit too quickly on a very hot day (in a good way).

Read with: Margaret Atwood (tbf just do everything with Margaret Atwood)

4.5 Stars
"The real trick is how and why we keep surviving at all."
If Margaret Atwood co-wrote a book with post-structuralist feminist author Helene Cixous, this might be the product of that union.
Dream-like and poetic, it is a tale of deep loss, love and of what it means to be a woman. It is a meditation on our society and whether Utopia can ever really exist.
The heat rises from the pages. The girls' voices are strong and clear and ensure we have a visceral sense of the island and of the characters' feelings. On that, I wanted to hear more from Sky's perspective.
It is a highly unusual novel that would generally fall outside my "comfort zone" of reading parameters, however I found the novel itself gripping and beautiful and read it within 24 hours. I had to find the "answers", to the extent extent there were any.
It is a haunting book that I will be thinking about and talking over in the coming weeks and months. It's not a book I would recommend to all of my friends - only those who don't mind a challenging read and who enjoy a truly unusual, expressive, thought-provoking experience.
Thank you to NetGalley, Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Books UK and Sophie Mackintosh for this ARC, provided for the purposes of an honest review.

I found this book had so much potential as it pictures an interesting version of dystopia. As a fan of dystopian books, I was hoping the idea will develop further, but unfortunately there are too many questions and not many answers. I suppose the author wanted to give a reader an open space for imagination and to be able to come to our own conclusions.

I was struggling for a good half of the book but kept pursuing. When the men arrived to the island, things started to progress but it came to a disappointing end. I can’t call it an end as well and don’t really see a reason to leave the story at that point. Is it going to be the second book after this?

As I mentioned, the concept of the story is quite interesting and at some places thought-provoking, but the plot hasn’t progressed to anything and really hasn’t given any reasons, answers or meanings.

I have been trying to dive into new and different things lately and I have to say that 'The Water Cure' certainly falls into that category. Its plot and the writing is just so atmospheric and almost languid. I have to admit that I haven't really read anything like this before and the author impressed me!

When I started reading the book, I was really confused. I mean, I had a rough idea of what it was supposed to be but the thing is, the book is so much more! Right from the very start, you can sense that there's something odd about the girls' life. The three sisters; Grace, Lia & Sky, live on an island sequestered away from the world. Their mother telling them that men are the literal worst, then we see the odd and rituals they have to go through in order to not be contaminated. This book felt almost like I was walking through a mist with no sense of direction and oddly enough, I liked that feeling.

Their living on the island is filled with all the amenities one could dream of but there's always that sense of something being wrong about the whole thing. As if we are just waiting to see something bad happen. Then the men come to the island and the results aren't quite pretty. When the attraction happens, it happens with some consequences. The whole thing remains mysterious and in the end, I was left with questions that I did not have any answers to! Were the men that terrible? If yes, why? What was happening outside of their little island? What sort of contamination was their mother trying to save the sisters from?

Sometimes, I love it when I don't have all the answers by the end of the book and this is one of those times. However, I have to admit that I would have loved to have answers to at least some of the questions. I wouldn't say it left me unsatisfied but I was very hungry for more. I think, in making everything vague, the author just fueled the fire for curiosity which is totally awesome.

All in all, this was a very beautifully written, almost haunting book. I loved that, it isn't often I get to say that. I would absolutely recommend it to people who want to read something different, something new. However, be prepared to get sucked into this odd, little world of mysteries.

This is an intriguing tale about young sisters who, along with their parents, live on an island. The girls are taught that the mainland is contaminated, and only their father goes there for supplies. They are also taught that men are evil, and they go through many ‘therapies’ and ceremonies to rid them of any contamination.

The story is beautifully written, however I would have liked to find out just a little more about the outside world and what was really happening, but the ambiguity of it is what the author wants, to keep you in the dark as much as the girls.

The water cure is a deeply unsettling (in a good way!) debut novel. Set in a world just to the side of ours, i felt the shadow of MeToo fall heavily over the narrative. With a trio of sisters on an island kept away from an undisclosed event that has tainted the mainland, and references back to women who were escaping the terrible, undisclosed actions of men, there are many parallels to draw. This makes the book sound worthy and dry - it’s anything but. It can be elliptical, and you are left to draw your own conclusions of what’s really happening, but pieces drop into place with a horrible inevitability. Essential reading.

This is not an easy book to read. I think I made a mistake in rushing to finish it. It is better savoured in small sips rather than devoured whole.

I was drawn to this book because of the narrative voice it starts off with. First person plural - the collective voice of three sisters - Grace, Lia, Sky - who belong to a strange, dysfunctional family, living in a dystopian world. The voices switches to the individual perspectives of each of the sisters. Grace's voice talks to "you" - the father who has [died (hide spoiler)].

The land they live on is bordered by the sea on one side, and barbed wire on the other. The father is the only male on the island and is called King. The mother administers the "Water Cure" to broken, damaged women who come to their land. It is made clear what is happening on the mainland, only that it is a dangerous world for women. Men are held responsible for the damage to women. There are headphones and other technology on the mainland, so it's definitely set in a modern world.

The daughters/sisters are kept protected from this outside world, but they must also undergo therapies and cures that are reminiscent of Wilhelm Reich and other weird child psychologists. I don't know. It's bad enough that I know the name of this one guy.

Anyway, I loved the first half of the book where everything was being set up. I hated the second half where things happened. I did not particularly like the resolution. Things got a bit TOO intense and weird for my taste, and I was genuinely enjoying the weirdness and intensity.

Not sure how many stars this deserves. 3.7?

I received a copy of The Water Cure from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This review can also be seen on my blog at www.readteacheatrepeat.wordpress.com After looking back at this story, I can't help to think of this more as a love-hate relationship.

Without giving away too many spoilers, I find the story to be ironic. What the girls think of as saving them ultimately leads to be their demise, or at least what I think is their traditional thought's demise. Transformation does come to play here but the book ends abruptly in that you never see that full transformation. I have to say that the read was very thought-provoking in more than one way. First, the themes and plot in itself is thought-provoking. Some of the rituals and things that are occurring really make you wonder what is so dangerous or what is thought to be so dangerous that this family has secluded themselves so intensely. The other way that the book is so thought provoking is because the author leaves so much of these answers out of the book. It must be purposeful that the reader can fill in the blanks as to why this family's lives have led to be this way but in the same time, it is almost annoying. I want more concrete reasons as to why their lives are this way.  I also have so many questions about the women's cult itself. It once seemed to be thriving. What really happened? And where did these rituals to cure the body really come from? I have so many questions that I want answered beyond my imagination. With all the flaws I had for the story, I still was interested in it. I wanted to keep reading because the information we do get is still odd. I have to be honest, this book is not something that I usually would have thought I would like. I am in the minority of not being a fan of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. This novel somewhat reminded me of it being there are so many questions as to why things are that way. I enjoy story lines that are more concrete and have more of a plot. This isn't to say that many others enjoy thought-provoking stories such as this; stories that make you think of its possibilities. This is a story that I will keep thinking about so all in all, the author did succeed in that way.

The Water Cure tells the story of three sisters; Lia, Grace and Sky as they live a reclusive island life with Mother and the 'King'. Here they learn that the outside world will harm them, although what that is never known. But then things begin to unravel in a way that the sisters can't control. Is everything, and everyone, really as it seems?

This was deeply atmospheric and strange. It's apparent from the start that something just isn't 'right' with how the girls live. This house is beautiful and grand, yet festers decay. Their days are filled with odd rituals designed to protect them, but they never know what it is they're being protected from. The prose are also odd and jarring, sometimes making the text hard to read and flow - but it fits perfectly with the tone of the novel, and helps to build an overall sense of unease.

The plot is also deliberately evasive, and there's no world building beyond the island the women live on. Normally this would annoy me, but I felt that just as the three women know little about the reasons behind their forced protection, and the outside world, so we know little too. The author takes us on a journey down which we must determine for ourselves what is happening, and I enjoyed that. The narrators are unreliable at best, and we must decide for ourselves what's really happening. I liked that nothing is spoon fed or dumbed down. We come to our own conclusions. Im not going to deny that at times however, especially in the beginning, I found this very confusing and difficult to get past.

The pace soon picks up when three men appear to disrupt the otherwise harmonious life. What happens next is obvious, yet still haunting to read. I felt for them. However, I also felt that by this point something more was going to happen. The plot is built up to such a point that I thought we'd see more of the outside world at least, or other moments of peril. But we didn't.

A short and beautiful read, yet strangely annoying at times.

The quality of the writing was not enough for me enjoy this one. It was simply not my 'kind of thing'. The vagueness of the scenario irritated rather than intrigued and I was unsure what message was being conveyed. Furthermore, I found little in the narrative that spoke to me from which I could form my own. I'm sure something deep and meaningful was going on, it just happened to utterly pass me by.