Grace, Lia and Sky live isolated from the world on a small island with Mother and King. Their isolation is explained by the risk of toxins in the world outside on one hand and the violence men. There they suffer various rituals and tortures designed to preserve their health and purity.

When King disappears, cracks begin to form in the stability of the small community. Mother attempts to maintain their disturbing way of life but King's absence has changed and weakened the bonds between those he has left behind. These are challenged when three men wash up on the shores of their haven, two adults and a child. . The dysfunctional characters of the girls, Lia in particular, are needy and naïve and have a tendency to fixate on things, often bodies, Because of this they are fascinated by the greater openness and flexibility of the new arrivals leaving them vulnerable, particularly when Mother disappears that the poison of the men reveals itself as toxic masculinity and misogyny rather than sickness.

There is an awful lot going on in the Water Cure and the constant bleakness is wearing. The cruelty of the parents from the physical torture of the water cure itself to the psychological trauma of assigning to "loved-most" pairs that always leaves one member isolated is horrific. The behaviour of the men depressingly predictable. After a little while the wheedling voice of Lia becomes irritating and it would have been better to include the voices of her sisters more often to provide relief from her juvenile tone. There's a one-tone feeling that is mirrored in the men, they are a threat but they have no character of their own, they are not much more than the cyphers for power and corruption that Mother and King have made them out to be which makes for uncomfortable reading. There's also an obligatory twist towards the end which did take me by surprise but didn't impact the story in an discernible way and Sophie Mackintosh fails to allow the climax it's due, the action occurs largely off-scene, the tone remains dreamlike and vague.

This book was exhausting. There have been so many "feminist" dystopian novels centred around the sufferings of women but sadly this is one that finishes with a whimper rather than a battle cry. The prose is languid, the three central 'heroines' (somewhat lacking) are pallid and lacking personality and things never get better. The three sisters have been brought up outside of civilisation but now things are about to change. Their father, the unsubtly named 'King' has vanished while out getting supplies. This is not a story about three women taking control of their destiny though. It's another instance of torture-porn masquerading as somehow educational. The 'King' and the girls' mother has been torturing them for years, they are all deeply damaged and now there are more men arrived to cause trouble. I am fed up of this trend where women are mistreated and we are supposed to see it as art. We should have progressed further from the days of Samuel Richardson and Pamela.

A really original read. This book is a dystopian fantasy about three sisters living on a remote island, protected by their father from the dangers of the mainland. Slightly hypnotic, many aspects of the story remain opaque. An engrossing and interesting read.

This novel follows three sisters who are brought up in an abusive, claustrophobic situation on an isolated island. We hear from each of them as well as their joint voice as they describe their world. It’s clearly a really difficult life but it’s never really explained where they are or why they’re there. I wasn’t sure if this was a dystopian novel or a post-apocalyptic one, or if the whole thing was a metaphor. It’s a feminist novel but it felt quite surface level to me and I was always kept at quite a distance so couldn’t connect with the characters. I have to say though that the writing is beautiful and it is this that kept me reading to the end. Overall I’m still not really sure what I think about this novel but I did enjoy the writing enough to want to read more by the author.

This seems to be a ‘love it or hate it’ kind of book: literary Marmite. The omens were good. The publishers managed to get a cover blurb from Margaret Atwood, and implied that this was a new feminist classic: the Handmaid’s Tale for the next generation. It was longlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize and, to give credit where it’s due, the writing is beautiful – but in the way that an art-house film is beautiful: stylised and a little self-indulgent. Hyped as a fable for the #MeToo era, this unsettling story centres on three sisters living on a remote island: Grace, Lia and Sky. They have been raised in isolation from infancy, protected from the poisonous toxins of the mainland, and treated with therapies to contain their burgeoning emotions. Complicated rituals devised by their New Age parents protect them further. But what are they being protected from? No one will explain. One day, shortly after their father disappears, they face an unprecedented threat. Two men and a boy wash up on their beach, disrupting the balance. The island’s prophylactic seclusion will never be the same again.

The girls exist in a dreamlike state of rites and customs, their lives underlaid with soft, thrumming tension, like the heavy atmosphere before a storm. They are constantly pressured to challenge their bodies’ limits, or shock their emotions into new paths. Each year, they draw lots to find out which of the other members of the family will be their ‘most-loved’ for that year. Someone always ends up with the blank, condemned to be special to no one, cut out of the warm family circle. This year it’s Lia, who already feels vicitimised. She longs for affection or physical touch from her sisters, but the rules are rules. Any failure to comply will be punished by their mother, who has developed their daily routines, in close conference with King, their father. The girls must do their exercises every morning; they must undergo ‘drowning therapy’, where they stay underwater just past the point of bearing; and ‘love therapies’, where they decide if they love one of their sisters enough to take on pain on her behalf. Strict and unchanging, these therapies dominate the girls’ lives, like the rituals of an ancient cult.

For cult this is. Grace and Lia, the eldest, remember the women who used to come to them. Men (except King) have never been welcome here, but not so long ago the women used to arrive in their boats, their eyes red-rimmed from the toxins, exhausted from the pain of having to survive in a world that weakens their very being. Their stays at the house always concluded with the ‘water cure’, a way of judging if they were strong enough to return to the world across the water. But recently, no one has come. The girls wander in the empty rooms, piling together like puppies or drifting languorously by the pool. (‘Life without our father becomes stretching, soft. Sugar melted in the pan and drawn into something new before hardening, contracting.’) Their life is in stasis. Nothing ever changes. Or at least, it hasn’t until now. For Grace is changing. Her stomach is swelling and Lia has been told that Grace has been granted a baby. She asked the sea for one, and the sea listened. Lia’s envy grows. All she wants is to be loved. Why won’t the sea give her a baby to love her? And then King leaves; and the other men arrive – Llew, James and the boy Gwil. At first, strict boundaries are drawn, the girls eyeing the men with suspicion – the men looking back with entitled curiosity. And then, when the girls’ mother disappears one day, the balance of power within this strange community starts to tip…

I think I had a strong reaction to this for several reasons. The most important is that I didn’t understand it. What is the point of this story? This is not the tale of a utopia being invaded. The girls have been told that they are protected, pure, strong, but they are clearly not. Their poor nutrition makes them unhealthy and they are prey to their parents’ cruelty and to King’s physical lusts, as Grace’s condition shows. This is more like a harem, where the man may claim to be a protector, but where in fact everything revolves around him – the womenfolk subtly jostling for his favour. (‘The photo placed ceremoniously in the lounge. No man documented. The man’s role is to make the document. The necessary curating of our lives.’) The male characters in this story are (with the exception of prepubescent Gwil) arrogant tricksters and predators. Some hide it better than others, but Mackintosh leaves us in little doubt that the same wolf-like nature hides within each and every one of them. None of them change or develop. And what of those toxins on the mainland? As I understood it, they aren’t toxins at all, but the poisonous realities of life for a woman in a man’s world. The women coming for therapy on the island were simply worn down by the oppressive domination of men, who feel entitled to use or objectify a woman’s body for their own satisfaction. The strange visitors prove to be no exception to this rule. And this is where I began to actively dislike the book.

I’m a feminist, but in the sense that I believe we need genuine equality, not in the sense that I believe all men are ‘the enemy’. And this book comes dangerously close to that. If it wants to be a consciously post-#MeToo book then, yes, I accept that some men do manipulate their power and exploit women. But not all of them: many men are caring, supportive and not exploitative (fortunately I only have men like this in my life). What are men like that – allies to women – going to think when they read a book in which their entire sex is written off as brute abusers with no grey areas? If a book depicted all women as shrill, nagging, abusing harpies, wouldn’t we women dislike it, and see it as a retrograde viewpoint? There’s too much of a trend at the moment of drawing up battle lines between men and women. Even in ‘fables’ like this, where a degree of simplicity is consistent with the literary form, it’s counterproductive. “Woman good. Man bad” is a gross oversimplification and, if that’s what this book wants to convey, then it’s doing a disservice. In our world right now, conversations on difficult subjects are becoming more and more polarised – us against them, with no place in the middle. We are destroying precisely the kind of mutual effort on common ground that we need to make in order to improve the situation. I’m not blaming this one book for all of this – but I am saying that I feel it is representative of the overall trend.

I am confused, as you can see. I felt the story was too obfuscated: a weird dreamland of tortures and incest carried out by two narcissistic parents on their chronically isolated daughters. It’s a grim picture of humanity’s capacity to harm. I felt as I sometimes feel when watching an art-house film which is meant to be a superb cinematic classic, but which I can only see as an assembly of dreamily-shot vignettes. I rather hope that I’ve got entirely the wrong end of the stick about it all. Yes, women are sometimes horribly exploited by men. Good grief, Margaret Atwood said that thirty years ago, but she said it with more nuance and allowed for the fact that not all men are villains. The Water Cure, for all its ambitions, is an unsatisfying fairy tale of abuse and thwarted identity, which, when compared to The Handmaid’s Tale, reflects the less complex times in which it was written.

For the review, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2019/10/14/the-water-cure-sophie-mackintosh/

It's rare that a book comes around I hear as much about as I have with The Water Cure. First I saw random mentions of it here or there, then the reviews came steaming in, and then the countless of lists that ranked it as a top feminist novel, a top 21st century novel, as the next The Handmaid's Tale or the next The Power. Even though I'm in Shanghai, English bookstores are rare, so you can imagine my joy when Elie from Penguin Books UK emailed me abut the opportunity to finally read it myself! Thanks to Penguin Books UK and Netgalley for providng me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This review contains spoilers.

The Water Cure is many things. One thing it is, is a meditation on love. What kind of love we accept, what kind of love we give, how it hurts and how it soothes. In The Water Cure Mackintosh shows us three sisters, Grace, Lia and Sky, growing up on an isolated island with their father and mother. From the beginning something is off as the reader realizes that the oldest daughter, Grace, is pregnant and that there can only be one father. The father, named King, is both the sisters' saviour and their abuser. Their mother, left nameless throughout the novel, is both complicit in their abuse and a victim herself. The sisters cling to each other and despise each other, with a desperation that occasionally becomes violent. From the start The Water Cure subverts what you expect of a dystopian novel. Usually some effort is made by the author to establish the reality of their world, but everything about Mackintosh's world remains vague. Who is this family, why are they on this island, where is this island? It is precisely this vagueness that gives the novel its eerie tone, while also allowing it to seem almost myth-like.

As the book progresses it becomes clearer that the older two sisters, Grace and Lia, are beginning to see the cracks in the story they have been wrapped in since infancy. So what is real and what isn't? Are the three sisters reliable narrators? Hardly, because they have been raised outside reality. They are to be the shining new woman, as King puts it, yet he has raised them to be malnourished and suspicious, hellbent on survival and utterly dependent. Most of the book's narration is done by Lia, the middle sister, who most often finds herself without a 'loved most'. One of the family's "therapies" is to draw irons, small tokens, that decide which in the family will be the focus of the love of another. Lia is often left without, leading to her being deprived of the comfort and validation that comes from knowing you're loved and valued. When men appear on the island after the disappearance of King, it is Lia whose desperation for touch and affection and acknowledgement triggers much of the end portion of the novel. The gentle precision with which Mackintosh analyses Lia's desperation for affection is heartbreaking. She wants to be seen, recognized, touched, but most important to have her existence affirmed.

One thing that touched me very deeply about The Water Cure were the different "therapies" enforced on the sisters by their parents. One I've mentioned above is the drawing of the irons to decide who you can love. Another that is brought up repeatedly shows mainly Lia being forced to harm animals or one of her sisters, thereby sparing her sisters from doing the same She is taught to show her love by hurting them, and in the privacy of her room she hurts herself equally out of remorse. Lia is fascinated by how the washed up men inhabit their own bodies, as if they've never had to be ashamed of it, had to purify it or punished it. That sense of freedom in your own body, the naturalness of it, is something most women will feel is missing from their own lives. It is just one example of how The Water Cure manages to, despite its extraordinary story, describe the ordinary desperation many women feel.

Shortly after reading The Water Cure I also read Sophie Mackintosh's short story Grace. In both we encounter female narrators who are in the midst of something extraordinary, who have to make big decisions about their lives while maybe not having all the tools to do so. Mackintosh's writing is very precise and yet lush. You can picture the life these women live and yet a dreamlike quality remains. When it comes to describing their inner emotional lives, however, Mackintosh is almost clinically sharp. There is no hiding from how torn up these women are. The Water Cure isn't as plot driven as other "feminist dystopias" such as, for example, The Handmaid's Tale. At times the novel feels more like a meditation on rather than a road map to love and liberation. It took me a very long time to figure out how to put my thoughts about this novel into writing and even now I'm not quite sure I've achieved my goal. I'll be thinking about The Water Cure for a long time, however.

The Water Cure reached 'hit' status incredibly quickly, which means I went into the novel with very high expectations. I found myself grasped by Mackintosh's insights and writing and look forward to her future writings with eagerness.

Read in August 2019

For me this novel was ALL in the beautiful cadence of the writing, the story itself I can't say I appreciated perhaps in the way that I should or was intended.

The Water Cure is a strange sort of hybrid, 3 sisters, an abusive isolated life, a possibly apocalyptic world but really who knows (or particularly cares by the time the ambiguous finale comes around) and there are parts of this that are completely compelling whilst others are strangely off putting. The sisters themselves all blend into one weirdly unlikely personality and even when the twist in that personality arrives the truth of them if you like, I still found it hard to separate them.

I'm not sure if this was meant to be particularly feminist but it felt too disjointed to have any real impact on me as a story but then there's the way that Sophie Macintosh uses language to describe which is truly wonderful. 

So I'm torn. Not sure how I feel about it to be honest but I'd definitely read this author again simply to sink into the prose.

This book was everywhere for so long, I was really curious about it. Glad I finally had a chance to read it and have to say it lives up to the hype.

I really couldn't get into this story. People growing up isolated on an island and being scarred for life. Not my kind of story.

I'd heard a lot about this book and wanted to check it out as I am generally a big fan of dystopian fiction with a female protagonist. There's a lot to like about this tale of three sisters, and while I enjoyed the story it was very similar to other books about isolated women struggling within an oppressive patriarchal system. I preferred Jennie Melamed's Gather The Daughters and Heartbreaker by Claudia Dey.

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.

I found the first part of this novel difficult as I could not really differentiate between the female characters that were narrating alternatively. However by the second part only one character was narrating and things seemed a little clearer. By this time I was hooked.

The ambiguity wasn’t frustrating for me as it has been in other reads and I loved the strangeness.
Something about Lia’s loneliness and longing really resonated with me and I found it both heartbreaking and beautiful.

This is a novel that will be on my mind for a while and I would reread.

“Once we [three sisters] have a father, but our father dies without us noticing.”

As a father of three daughters this probably counts as the personally most arresting opening sentence I have read - a novel longlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize.

On one level this book is a feminist dystopia - and like many dystopias takes an element of the observed world and extrapolates in an imagined but imaginable way. In this case, the book proceeds from toxic masculinity and takes it to a literary as well as literal conclusion to imagine a world where men are poisonous to women.

Perhaps though unlike many other dystopias which explore in a circular fashion their central idea and its implications (for example The Power) - here this idea, although I think vital to the book’s foundation, represents more of a starting point for a book which is light on exposition and heavy on ambiguity.

I was reminded of “The Red Clocks” a book which as I said in my review was “more about relationships between women explored within a patriarchal/misogynistic world rather than just exploring the structure of that patriarchy”.

At the heart of this ambiguity to the reader (but as the book concludes to the girls) is: the degree of truth in the story their parents - King and Mother - tell them of the dangers of the outside world; the extent to which this danger, even if assumed true, justifies the controlling (almost cultish) regime of (borderline abusive) treatments and restrictive prescriptions that King, with the aid of Mother, impose on them.

The three girls narrate the book in first party sections (mainly individually in the voices of the two older sisters Grace and Lia, with the middle sister Lia dominating the centre of the book, but at the start and finish in a chorus with their younger sister Sky who is seen as an uncorrupted other to be protected and shielded).

Due to the absence of exposition and excess of ambiguity, the book is like an incomplete canvas on which the reader can sketch and colour their own interpretations.

The book is heavy on imagery of water and salt (in a way which recalls ritual bathing, cleansing ceremonies and hydro treatments) and muslin (as an image for filtering of impurities, separation and purification).

There is a clear link, as hinted above, to patriarchal cults, or less extreme examples of parents imposing psychological abuse on their children. At an even more removed extreme, the book made me consider the often exaggerated warnings that the parents and even society gives to children so as to try to ensure their safety (Charley says for my generation of children, or stranger danger for my own).

There is an element of environmental disaster - albeit in this case quite literally man made - and of a survivalist novel after such a drama. And I understand this idea was the initial genesis of the novel.

Environmental concepts are important here. The author’s agent has described the characters as Earth, Water and Sky and this I think captures their different characters: the grounded, analytical, almost bitter Grace; the fluid Lia, moving downhill to where she can gain affection; the pure and not of this world Sky. It also captures the all encompassing relationship between the girls and the self contained environment in which they live, which is both dominated by them and all encompassing for them.

As a father of three daughters and having watched their interactions and dynamics for several hours as I read and reviewed this book, the book is clearly strong on female sibling relationships; even in the absence of a voice for Sky which I have seen criticised elsewhere, perhaps not surprising given the large matriarchal Welsh family in which the author has described herself growing up.

The book is also I think excellent on capturing how some parents play off children against each other - I was strongly able to relate King’s treatment of the two oldest daughters to situations I have seen in the childhood of others.

There are some fascinating parallels with the #metoo movement and in particular the way people have reacted to it: including the generational divides that have occurred in the feminist movement as a result (albeit the parallel is far from exact) and some of the denial in male reaction.

“It is not for me to disregard their pain ... They are in the minority ... .... [he] can’t deny that men are killing women ... But it’s not like you think All of it is smoke and mirrors, overreaction ... We could be women like any other, taking the usual precautions. Yes, the risk of violence upon us is higher. Even he as a man can’t disregard that.”

Finally I saw strong parallels with Shakespeare. The patriarchal King trying to direct the lives of his three daughters I of course a clear nod to King Lear; however I found the more intriguing comparison to The Tempest, with Prospero creating an isolated and fully patriarchal community for he and Miranda and seeking to control her sexuality and attitude to men.

Overall I enjoyed this book and will follow the author closely

“So this is how it begins she says, but of course it has already begun. It began for us a long time ago”.