Wow. Just.. wow. I have so much to say about this book and I don’t even know where to begin.

This book reads like a poem. A fluid, constant stream of consciousness in the third person shifting from POV to POV. You get to intimately know each character from inside their own mind and how they view and love the others in the story.

It tells the story of the Rhodes family, a long line of twins with a significant inheritance from their father and a mission to find their own way in the world, outside of their father’s shadow.

Rockwell Rhodes (Rocky) the Patriarch of the family, drops out of Harvard and moves to the High Sierras in the early 1900’s to be as far away from his father and his money as he can to live off the land and be a real cowboy. He falls in love with a French doctor (Louisiana “Lou”) and they make a life and medical practice living off the land in the high, snow capped mountains of the Sierras and Mount Whitney. A simple life with Mexican And Native American laborers living on their ranch together as family and friends, they seem to have the life they’ve always dreamed of. They have two beautiful twins (Sunny and Stryker) and life is good. When the children are three, Lou succumbs to Polio and Rocky is left to parent the children alone in the isolated high desert. His twin sister, Caswell (Cas) immediately abandons her life and dreams as a professional touring harpist in Scandinavia and turns her ball gowns in for galoshes and crewneck sweaters to raise the children alongside her brother and best friend.

Stryker is the younger twin, bold and brazen, flirtatious and devious. He never seems to forgive his father for his other’s death, and his relationship with his father has always been strained and tense. Sunny is the practical, pensive, motherly twin.. always keeping things in order and often sacrificing her comfort and experiences in life to protect her twin brother. When Stryker decides to leave the family and join the Navy, he only tells his sister Sunny. On December 7, 1941, the Naval Base Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii is bombed by the Japanese, and Sunny confesses to her family that that is where Stryker had been stationed with his new Japanese wife Suzy and their two twin boys, Ralph and Waldo Rhodes. They are informed that Stryker was aboard the Arizona and has perished in the attack, and the whereabouts of his new wife and children are unknown.

While the family is searching for answers, and the United States is bloodthirsty with a violent and racist rage against anyone of Japanese decent, a young Jewish lawyer from Chicago named Schiff comes to town with an unusual job for the Department of the Interior. While eating dinner at the best place in town, Lou’s, he meets Sunny and is immediately taken with her. When he finds out that she is the lead chef and is living her dream of creating savory, meaningful dishes from all over the world in her own restaurant, he admits to her that he is in charge of opening and operating one of the largest Japanese internment camps on the border of her family land.

This story has so many layers of life, love, loss, grace, grudges, and hope… all with water at the center. You get to know each character so intimately that their development though the pages is both satisfying and sad, as their death and loss become yours. The love and selflessness of the Rhodes family is a thing of beauty and the love and devotion of Schiff to Sunny and Rocky to Lou sets the bar so high, like only a novel can. The story was so rich with French, Spanish, Japanese, Hebrew/Yiddish and Native American phrases, slang and shorthand that I felt immersed in so many cultures the entire time. The details of each and every food made my mouth water, and I felt like I could smell and taste the things Sunny described. The ending was so devastatingly beautiful and fitting that I can’t even be upset.

This book was phenomenal, exquisite, I couldn’t put it down. I can’t recommend it enough.

I am grateful to Simon & Schuster and Net Galley for providing me with the opportunity to read an advance copy of this magnificent novel.

20th century California, specifically the Owens Valley, provides a turbulent setting for Wiggins spectacular epic. The rancher at the center of the tale, Rocky Rhodes, is the blue blood son of a brutal New York capitalist in the mold of the Astors and the Morgans. When railroad magnet Wellington Rhodes dies, Rocky and his twin sister, Caswell, sell off the family’s assets and Rocky heads West. Rocky’s wife, Lou, whom he first spied on a Chicago rail platform, is the only female physician practicing in Inyo County, ministering to the resident Indian and Mexican populations until her death from polio. Rocky is left to raise their three-year-old twins, Stryker and Sunny, at their ranch, Las Tres Silas (the Three Chairs, a homage to Rocky’s adoration for Paul Theroux), in the shadow of the Sierras.

Cas, a six foot three woman who Rocky thought looked like Spencer Tracy, was the defining woman in the twin’s lives, sacrificing her career as an acclaimed harpist, and her own chance at parenthood, to assist her grief stricken brother raise his twins. Stryker blamed his father for his mother’s premature death, and even when he was old enough to understood how polio infiltrates, nothing could diminish his anger or refocus it away from Rocky. Much to land-bound Rocky’s dismay, Stryker joined the navy, writing from Pearl Harbor to his sister periodically who passed along the news to Rocky. Sunny remained with her father and aunt, operating a local restaurant, Lou’s.

World War II encroaches. The desiccated land adjacent to the Three Chairs is requisitioned by the government. Schiff, an employee of the Department of Interior, is charged with building a detention camp, Manzanar, at the base of Mount Whitney to house Japanese-American citizens after the President banned all citizens of Japanese descent from living on or near the western coast from Canada to Mexico.

At the beginning of the 20th century, agents were sent to Manzanar, two hundred miles north of Los Angeles, to buy up land for water rights that they could send back south by canal and aqueduct to a thirsty Los Angeles. These water poachers from Los Angeles built an aqueduct, designed by William Mulholland, that diverted run-off from the Sierras from the Owens Valley, causing Rocky’s neighbors to abandon their arid ranches and move north.

Rocky, who had waged a thirty year “holy war” against the Department of Water in Los Angeles, had sued on the theory that the City needed to pay for the dust that blew off the drained lake and polluted the air requiring dust mitigation. Rocky’s vendetta intersects with the detainees whom he thinks that he could use to demonstrate a cause and effect between geriatric emphysema and pediatric asthma and the water being diverted.

This magnificent novel is seeped in history that is familiar to Californians, but is so rooted in the lives of these unforgettable characters’ that it makes the familiar history particularly vivid. Whether Wiggins’ is describing the minutiae of the delectable meals created by Sunny or the majestic beauty of the expansive Owens Valley, each sentence is poetic and deftly crafted. It is not an overstatement to call this panoramic novel a masterpiece.

I was immediately interested in this book when I read the description concerning water rights and the protection of beloved California ranchland (as I sit smack-dab in the Arizona desert and parts of our state face water restrictions that seem, also, to cater to “the many vs. the few.” i.e., Ranchers/farmers in our county are being restricted while large cities in other counties have zero restrictions).

“You can’t save what you don’t love” was a theme presented throughout this novel – a sentiment I’ve voiced many times regarding humans’ detachment from nature. In this novel, it becomes an expertly woven theme – related to land and relationships and humanity.

Naturally, water images abound, and each section is presented with the various properties of thirst, eleven in all, including, among them, memory, desire, truth, reinvention, evaporation (brilliant)! Some of the liquidy imagery:

…Here he could hear the water, he could see the water, the shadow of the water: ice on the mountains vapor in the clouds….

He had loved the land and had watched it parch and buckle, water trapped and stolen by … he didn’t even like to think the name. Los Angeles.

I could relate to Rocky and his absolute adoration for the ruggedness of the area (and would hope to see Pierce Brosnan cast as him!). This novel tackles tough and tender issues simultaneously: love and loss, the corruption of large municipal entities, and the horrific reality of Japanese-American internment camps in America. It address moral consciousness and humanity, and pits it against greed and selfishness.

The writing is dense and complex and uses a lot of unconventional grammatical and punctuation techniques, which may turn some readers off (lots of dashes and parentheses, stream of consciousness). And while I wholly enjoyed this story, I noted a kind of unevenness throughout that I couldn’t quite put my finger on – very lengthy soliloquies that needed paring down (for my tastes) and often-excessive descriptions that got in the way of the story (usually something I don’t mind).

When I read the Afterword, I gained some clarity regarding my reaction. That said, the Afterword also erased any potential quibbles I might have had. When I learned the author had suffered a massive stroke while this book was still in draft stage, and read about the struggle her daughter went through to ensure it would be published, and then learned of the author’s struggle back to speech and sight and writing … I cried. The amount of work the editor, also, put in to coax the damaged-but-healing author’s words back from her… I appreciated it even more.

Many thanks to the publisher, Simon and Schuster, and NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

Know in advance that this amazing novel will demand your full attention- and that it might not be for everyone. Set during WWII, it's the story of Rocky, an East Coast patrician who relocated to Lone Pine, California and built a life on a ranch with his wife Lou and his twins Stryker and Sunny, and later with his sister Cas. The Los Angeles Water Authority has, however, stripped him and others in the region of their water, almost killing the ranch. Schiff, an attorney with the Department of Interior arrives and shakes up Sunny and Rocky's lives as he is charged with building and maintaining what becomes the Manzanar internment camp. He falls in love with Sunny, who runs a small French restaurant in town, and is gutted by guilt over the people in the camp. It's impossible to describe the scope of this novel, which moves from Lone Pine to Hawaii to Europe and back and forth in time. Much of it reads almost as stream of consciousness and there are occasional lists. Know that there are no chapters (at least not in the kindle version) and it might take a moment to transition between perspectives. That said, these are vivid and real characters with a story that kept me turning the pages until the end- and the afterword. Much credit and appreciation is due to Wiggins' devoted and determined daughter Lara Porzak who has cared for her and this novel since Wiggins' stroke. It's not an easy read by any means but I found myself unable to put it down. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. Highly recommend.

Not an easy read in spite of my keen interest in both the time period and SoCal water issues . I think this is a book that I would like to revisit when I have a bit more patience and have the volume in front of me. This is one title that did not benefit from ePub format. Wiggins style is distracting but given her importance as an American author, I will revisit the book. Thanks to S & S for the ARC>

I savored every word of this magnificent novel. On its surface, Wiggins tells the story of a family living in the shadow of Mount Shasta, set against the context of Los Angeles' constant need for water - much more water than it can produce - and the internment of Japanese-Americans at Manzanar during World War II. But to think that the story is the sum of this book is to underestimate it grossly. Wiggins' theme - "You cannot save what you do not love" - resonates throughout this 544 page novel. The Properties of Thirst is a novel of love, of loss, and of strength written in beautifully poetic language. At first, the lack of conventional chapters and other markers on which readers rely to guide them through a novel bothered me considerably. But after a while I began not to notice them (except when I wanted to read to the end of a conventional chapter before falling asleep) and now, having finished the book, I appreciate the continuous flow of this wonderful novel. Brava to Wiggins and to her daughter and the other collaborators who helped Wiggins complete the work.

DNF'ing at 40%. I am finding the formatting (abstract grammatical choices/long passages without indentation or quotation marks) just too difficult to follow in a digital format.

Thank you to Simon Schuster for the ARC. I look forward to giving this book another try someday.

I received a copy of this book to review from Net Galley. I was excited to start it because I'd read another novel by this author - Evidence of Things Unseen - that I liked it very much. I was surprised to find this book a bit uneven, with abrupt transitions within and between chapters, and too long overall,
although there were characters and elements of the book I liked quite a lot. At the conclusion of the novel there was a section written by the author's daughter, explaining that her mother had a severe stroke while she was writing the novel and was able to complete it only after a lengthy recovery. That may explain the book's lack of flow, or perhaps that was just my perception of it. In any case, I do recommend the title as the good outweighs the bad. (less)

Loved this! A sweeping family saga with richly developed characters, deep questions, and a fascinating setting. I love books that are set in the WWII time period but manage to tell a fresh tale. Here, the diversion of water to Los Angeles and the set up of a Japanese-American internment camp are both interesting plot points.

Properties of Thirst is a grand and magnificent book reminiscent of Wallace Stegner's best novels. Wiggins has created a cast of characters the reader will never forget as they become part of a strong family saga. She develops these characters' lives, connections, and history with supreme skill and attention in order to create an indubitable strong sense of place and ties to the land. Each character establishes his or her own contribution to the weaving of plot that draws the reader in at every turn. There's Rocky, who owns California land and water rights that put him in direct conflict with the City of Los Angeles. He mourns his wife, Lou, a doctor who left the world too early. They have twins, Stryker and Sunny. Stryker, whose name is somehow prescient, is lost at Pearl Harbor. Sunny has a delightful and instructive enchantment with French cooking, and the descriptions of this relationship are simply and beautifully poetic. Schiff is a rather shy and highly responsible lawyer hired by the Department of the Interior to set up an internment camp for Japanese-Americans near Rocky's ranch. Cas, Rocky's sister who is strongly involved in the raising of the twins, is somewhat of an enigma but has her own delightful and determined character development that completes the circle of relationships that is one of the most dynamic, true, and complex of any recent book. If you don't have time to contribute to reading straight through this book, then I suggest you wait until you do, as you won't be able to put it down.

Historical fiction, set in Owens valley in California, describing the diversion of water to Los Angeles( hence changing the entire valley) and the creation of a WW2 Japanese internment camp . All of this is described through the interaction of a fictional family,the Rhodes, with Rocky the patriarch.
The characters are great-my favorites being Sunny and Schiff, and internment camp, and how difficult it was to create, was fascinating.It was long, too long for my taste, and I did not like
the writing style.
In summary, at least for me,- great story, distracting writing style.

"You can't save what you do not love." Tragedy and ethical irony claw at the hearts of Mary Higgins' larger than life characters in this epic literary masterpiece about finding love and family in all the wrong places. Rockwell Rhodes receives his wealth from his industrialist father, whom he hates for stealing minerals out of the ground for his fame and, of course, for the literal mine of fortune that is now "Rocky's" inheritance. Rocky escapes the big city and creates an idyllic life on his California ranch with the love of his life and two beautiful children, until the water below his land is 'mined' right out from under him by the LA Water company. Rocky's wife Lou took a gamble when she followed him, a stranger who spied her from across the Chicago train station they were both passing through. He stole her heart by building the mansion with a bell tower he had promised, and he did it with his own bare hands! "And what if love does not save you?" In the end her luck ran out when, in spite of being a doctor AND a chef level garden to table master creator of healthy and delectable food, she was struck down by sickness and tragically expired due to ill informed treatment. The wild child of the twins was Stryker, but he ends up a hero in an infamous national incident of war. Sunny, stubborn but sweet, seeks and recreates the love of her absent mother in the mysteries of food she must unlock from French language books with unknown ingredients. She ironically finds love with a Jewish lawyer and war officer, in WWII, tasked with creating the prison-home for Japanese-American citizens on the plot next door; he knows his assignment is both illegal and immoral and he wants out. It is hard to see the beauty in Rocky's 6'4" twin sister, who left NYC to help raise her brother's children, until you see her play the harp or travel with her as the puppet master of culture in the big apple and Europe. About the properties of thirst and water: sometimes it will swallow the ones you love, and the only part of them you can save is their essence, hidden in the memories. If you are as good as Higgin's characters, your love can recreate that essence from thin air, even when there are no real memories… The literary experience of this four digit length novel is as delectable as the cuisine and the stories of love that are artfully woven throughout its masterful language. You will masticate the darkly humorous turns of phrase and savor the empty places in the sinuous themes of this steadily erudite experience, and you will never want it to end! The afterward is the true story of the author's cruel health incident. The way her daughter and friends-village helped her rally to finish this beautiful story is an inspiration.
Thank you to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for this ARC. My favorite ever.

Where to start with this magical book? Perhaps with the end note written by Marianne Wiggens' daughter explaining the process they went through to support the author in completing the volume after a seriously debilitating stroke. Or with the style and tone that remind me of another cherished author, Mark Helprin. The story moves through time and place capturing formative moments for the very interesting characters who are not always likeable but always make you care. No magical realism - just magical storytelling and character development. Very enthusiastically recommended.
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As a lover of historical fiction, and having grown up in Southern California, I really enjoyed the setting of this book, WWII, Lone Pine, Owens Lake, and the ongoing story of water “theft” to irrigate Los Angeles made this an interesting base for a fascinating story about an unusual family. I loved the word crafting centered on French culinary arts, as well as the interplay between the characters. This is my favorite novel written by Marianne Wiggins.

As in previous works, Wiggins explores historical events in the context of deeply imagined characters, in part bespeaking that the circumstances of our times can make—or break— who we are, what we become. Set in the Owens Valley of California as the United States enters WWII, the plot is centered around the “redistribution” of water resources from this rural community (the few) to Los Angeles (the many) and the creation of an internment camp for Japanese Americans. The story of the latter is told from the perspective of the Department of the Interior employee sent to set up the camp rather than that of the internees.

It is the story of the characters that absorbs us. With an irony not lost on him, Rocky, whose inherited wealth is derived from the extraction of natural resources, is battling the behemoth Los Angeles, which has “stolen” his water via its aqueduct. Having rejected his father’s pursuit of wealth, he headed west, where he built a home for his beloved, now deceased. Living with him is his sister Cas, who as a manly sized, intelligent, and independent woman has had a lifetime coping with issues of conventional femininity. Cas arrived to help care for her twin niece and nephew upon the death of their mother. Sunny, now a young woman, has grown up trying to fill the void that should have been her relationship with her mother. To that end, in part, she is focused on all things food. Her brother, Stryker, is known through the other characters and is portrayed as fearless—as well as somewhat reckless. Into the lives of this somewhat unconventional and eccentric family arrives Schiff, a first-generation, urban, Jewish American lawyer sent from the Department of the Interior to set up the internment camp—an irony not lost on him. Although a minor theme, the contrast of class here echoes the contrast of citizenship based on ethnicity.

Yet, in outlining the plot and main characters of Properties of Water, the most important element of the novel is not addressed, and that is the intelligence and depth with which Marianne Wiggins brings her story to us. Her insight, her skill in creating a seamless world, her ability to bring us to the cusp of stream of consciousness without getting lost in it, characterizes her work. And, as with any good book, we feel the loss of the characters and hope for their (fictional) future.

A dense, ambitious, and ultimately rewarding novel of suffering and triumph, Marianne Wiggins' PROPERTIES OF THIRST is studded with insights and rich with characterizations. Not an easy read, this is a novel which lingers long after the final page. Recommended!

Many thanks to Simon & Schuster and to Netgalley for the pleasure of an early read.

The poetry of The Properties of Thirst by Marianne Wiggins gave me chills. This epic and sweeping novel is destined to be an award winner, telling a timeless story of family, greed, and grief. It imagines how everyday Americans might have resisted the travesty of the internment of Americans of Asian descent during WWII.

At 544 pages, Marianne Wiggins' "Properties of Thirst" requires a lot of stamina from a reader. There are rewards, though, to be had for sticking with a story that includes fascinating details about the administration of U.S. detention camps for Japanese during World War II and the blame-game after Pearl Harbor. Too often for my taste, though, there are patience-testing long stretches about a female character's culinary interests. Not to say that some readers won't find those pages interesting, even fascinating, especially with their gorgeous, poetic prose, but to my admittedly non-gourmand taste, they slowed what is an ambitious and, yes, as some reviewers have said, magisterial World War II-era novel.