“A gripping, sinister fable!” —Margaret Atwood, via Twitter ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR • GLAMOUR • GOOD HOUSEKEEPING • LIT HUB • THRILLIST King has tenderly staked out a territory for his wife and three daughters, Grace, Lia, and Sky. Here on his island, women are protected from the chaos and violence of men on the mainland. The cult-like rituals and therapies they endure fortify them from the spreading toxicity of a degrading world. But when King disappears and two men and a boy wash ashore, the sisters’ safe world begins to unravel. Over the span of one blistering hot week, a psychological cat-and-mouse game plays out. Sexual tensions and sibling rivalries flare as the sisters are forced to confront the amorphous threat the strangers represent. A haunting, riveting debut, The Water Cure is a fiercely poetic feminist revenge fantasy that’s a startling reflection of our time.

Everyone accepted that The Water Cure was a dark book, and we were all stuck by its vivid and powerful depiction of toxic masculinity. It's an unpleasant journey, from the torture the three daughters endure as part of their treatments by their sadistic month to the small but inescapable misogyny of the first outside men who arrive at their home to the legacy of the hurt women who came to this complex in the past to get the mother's cure to the toxicity of the men of the world. We spent a lot of time discussing whether or not there was some post-apocalyptic world that the family was fleeing, but we concluded (and were honestly and somewhat horrifying surprised that so many critics did not see this) that the book was about the modern world, and the toxicity that the parents warn against is just the sexism the world presents every day. This was particularly brought home by the small micro (and not so micro) aggressions that the men deliver to Lia and Grace -- Lleu accusing Lia of manipulating him with tears, James defending Lleu's killing of the mother as justified by his humiliation. In the end, we concluded you didn't need a disease to make that world awful. We all also really like Lia's voice. We agreed that we weren't sure about the book until the men arrived, but Lia's conflicted and emotionally vulnerable journey through sexuality and betrayal was very powerful. We believed in her stamina and perseverance and much as we believed in Grace's anger, and so the ending made a kind of bleak sense, in that the girls were fundamentally deluded about the world but essentially right about the dangers. However, despite the book working at these levels, more than a few people did not enjoy reading it. Julie put this opinion very succinctly by arguing that reading a book that exposes the world as deeply sexist is not necessarily telling you anything new, and thus just a painful ride that has no purpose. As we've read a lot of books about people suffering, that led to a conversation about why some suffering in reading is compelling and some isn't, but we couldn't really get much closer on figuring out why this torture was not compelling the way others (see A Little Life) were. In the end, we all agreed that Mackintosh had created a powerful, well-written allegory about how woman suffer at the hands of men and other women, but we did not all agree whether that vivid picture was insightful enough for its depressing journey.