Customer Reviews

The Memory of Water

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

What a pleasure to read a novel that has it all together - characters that are real and easy to see, a setting that draws you in and wants to keep you there, and a plot that keeps you wondering right up to the last minute. This was not a book I plowed through at breakneck speed. I was savoring it too much - it's one of those ones you really don't want to end. The surprising thing I learned when I completed the book was that Karen White doesn't live anywhere near the water - and she has never sailed! You will swear that she is sitting in an oceanfront cottage writing this story - with her sailboat tied to her dock. Bravo, Karen, for all your research. The rich detail of the characters, home, town and sailing experience, is perfection!

Karen has a wonderful facility for leaving a trail of information that eventually adds up to a plausible conclusion. I love those "Aha!" moments and the pleasant re-thinking one goes through as the pieces fall into place. This is my first Karen White book, so I now have the pleasure of looking forward to reading the others!

When I read Karen White's The Memory of Water it was like watching an artist paint, with every word she writes you can actually see the landscape she describes come to life.
It was a haunting tale of mental illness and about those who survive it and those who don't.
A bewitching tale of love and loss and love found at last, about the story of sisters and a love that only sisters can share and understand.
This book is a must read for any of you out there that love great fiction.

After being away from her hometown for almost a decade, Arizona school teacher Marnie Maitland returns home to McLellanville, South Carolina. She only came back to the Low Country because her former brother-in-law Quinn begged her to help her nine-year-old nephew Gil whom she has never met.

As Marnie and Gil connect and to a lesser degree she with Quinn, her sister Diana resents her intruding in the life of her son and for that matter hers. Marnie realizes her sibling is angry with her and assumes the reason is the boating accident when they were kids that killed their mother while they survived. Whereas Marnie recalls little of that fatal day, Diana has tied the accident to the "Maitland Curse" that has haunted the family for decades.

THE MEMORY OF WATER is a strong family drama due to the four prime players feeling real especially their flawed interrelationships. The story line smoothly changes viewpoint between the quartet so the audience sees different looks at the same event or issue; especially how the sisters interpret their mother's death. With a final plausible yet surprising twist, readers will be LEARNING TO BREATHE while waiting for her next tale.

Harriet Klausner

After playing hooky one day in 7th grade to read Gone With The Wind, Karen White knew she wanted to be either Scarlett O'Hara or a writer. In fact, Karen's grade school teachers had encouraged her to be a writer.

This very self-disciplined woman (Karen describes herself as 'anal retentive') played classical piano since age 5, grew up in the US and London as the daughter of an oil company executive, and graduated Cum Laude from Tulane with a BS in Business Management.

Before marrying and having children, Karen worked in operations management, and then stopped working outside the home to pursue her life-long dream of writing. Publishing success came quickly to Karen, with her first book, In the Shadow of the Moon.

In 1996, while her children were babies, she began to write In the Shadow of the Moon, an historical time-travel novel about the civil war, using the research resources of Georgia's rich southern history for her novel. She had written a few chapters and sent it in to a contest and it won!



The judge was an agent who suggested changes and who then represented her to a publishing house. In the Shadow of the Moon was published in 2000. It was a double finalist in Romance Writers of America's prestigious RITA award.

Since then, Karen has published her 8th novel, The Memory of Water, with two more scheduled - The House on Tradd Street (November, 2008) and an as-yet untitled book in 2009.


I do not know how Karen does it. When my two children were small, I decided I could NOT manage to write and do everything a mom is required to do. She admits this juggling is one of life's more difficult tasks.

What I really like about Southern fiction is that it involves intense emotional drama, complex, tortured personalities and dark southern Gothic elements. While reading The Memory of Water, I kept thinking of Pat Conroy (one of Karen's favorite writers and author of The Prince of Tides - I did not read it but saw the movie).

In The Memory of Water, two sisters become estranged after a childhood sailing tragedy killed their mother. In a cruel twist of fate, another sailing accident several years ago nearly killed one of the sisters and her young son, who has become mute since the accident.

One of the sisters, Marnie Maitland, goes back to the South Carolina low country of her hometown to visit her estranged sister, Diana, and her 9-year-old nephew, Gil. Marnie begins to realize how intertwined they all are - the Maitland family curse, the dark family secrets that begin to unravel, the mental illness that runs in the family, and the childhood sailing accident that killed Diana and Marnie's mother.





Look at Chapter 10. Gil is the nephew.

EXCERPT

***


"Last spring, before Mama got sick, she bought me a baby orange tree. She took me with her to pick it up, and then I helped her carry it to the highest part of Grandpa's property -- the place where you can see the marsh and the ocean at the same time. This was the spot where the first Maitlands lived in a small house while the big house was being built it burned down at the same time the big house did, and sometimes, when the wind is blowing out to the ocean, I think I can smell smoke.

I held the tree and its burlap root ball while Mama dug a hole with her shovel. She was feeling better, she said, and she wanted to remember it by planting a tree on that spot. When she was done, she wiped her dirty hands on her white pants but didn't seem to notice. Then she put both palms on my cheeks, and I had to remind myself not to back away. I wasn't used to her touching me, and it was like I was testing the temperature of the ocean by diving in headfirst.

Mama put her forehead against mine. "Gil, you might be too young to understand this now. But I just have this feeling..." She stopped for a moment and closed her eyes. I wanted to ask her what she was feeling, but I was pretty sure that I already knew. The tree and her bringing me here were a beginning, but they felt like an ending, too. Sort of like being on a sailboat and sailing close to the wind when it suddenly changes. Your sails go slack and you start floundering until you can figure out the new direction of the wind. Or you could just sit there and go nowhere. I looked in mama's face and felt sorry for her. Even with her medicine, I could see that she couldn't always tell which way the wind was blowing...

..."I know I haven't been the beset mother to you, Gil. And I want you to know that it's always been because of me. It has nothing to do with you." Her mouth turned up in a little smile. "You're a sweet, smart, handsome and talented boy --the kind of son any mother or father would want."...

..."You see, we're all born with holes in our lives, and we spend our years on this earth trying to fill them. My art has filled in most of them, and for a while, your father did." She kissed my cheek and smiled into my eyes, which look so much like hers. "And you, too, Gil. I know you might not believe me, but you have filled my life in so many ways." Tears started dripping down her face and I began to worry that this might be the beginning of one of her episodes. My dad had told me how to watch for them but I wasn't sure. I wanted to think the she had finally decided to become my mother, the way my friends had mothers. And I wondered if that had been the hole I was born with. The hole a mother was meant to fill and why inside of me was so empty..."

END EXCERPT

***


A terrific read, full of family drama and insight.

As a huge fan of Karen White's two other books [FALLING HOME and AFTER THE RAIN, both 5-star reads], I looked forward to reading more of her work. However, this book was so very slow and the characters were so very flat that I had to force myself to turn the pages. After awhile, I thought that I had become as depressed as the bipolar sister. Couldn't even finish it.......

I'd love to see her return to the style of HOME and RAIN, where there was character development, an authentic Southern mood AND a plot that actually moved along.

Marnie Matlaind returns to her Lowcountry birthplace after being gone for a decade to help in the healing of her traumatized nine-year old nephew she's never met.

At her return, Marnie is forced to face the demons of her childhood, the drowning death of her mother, and the Maitland curse that has haunted her family for generations.

White uses first person narrative with each of the four main characters. This allows the reader to see different angles of the story. The characters are quite real and believable, as is the anguish that each feels due to the mental instability that seems to have been passed down through the Maitland family.

A suprising ending answers several unknowns and brings an amazing and powerful conclusion to this family drama.

Karen White is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. Her latest book, The House on Tradd Street [review], was an amazingly written book that was as gripping as it was beautiful. The Memory of Water is equally as haunting, and though I didn't enjoy it quite as much as The House on Tradd Street, I still thought it was an excellent novel.

The setting of the book is in the Lowcountry marshes of South Carolina. White does an amazing job describing the locale. Though I have never visited the area, I have a vivid picture of it in my head from White's descriptions. They are as beautiful as they are haunting.

White is also a master at building suspense. She manages to keep the reader hooked throughout the novel without giving out too much information. The disquieting feeling her novels evokes in the reader is reminiscent of Carol Goodman, whose virtues I have previously extolled in this blog. [Review of The Night Villa][Review of The Drowning Tree]

The character of Marnie was extremely well written; she had many ghosts of her own that she had to face. Diana was a little more difficult. She was very difficult to sympathize with, and the way she treated Marnie was disappointing at best and cruel at worst. When the mystery is finally revealed at the end of the book, Diana moves even further away from the reader.

Overall, I really enjoyed The Memory of Water. It had a little bit of everything - mystery, character development, a wonderful setting, and the connections of family. I'd definitely recommend it to other readers and can't wait to pick up another one of her novels.

This is the first book I've read by this author. I was pleased with the story and characters. There were times I felt like there was too much dialogue and detail that didn't really need to be there. I was a bit disappointed at the end and felt like it was wrapped up a little too much and the end felt rushed when compared to the length of the book. I enjoyed the story and wanted to finish it, so 4 stars.

This bizarre story is centered around the Maitland family's three sailing disasters, in the first of which a mother tries (and fails) to drown her daughters and herself; the second in which one of these daughters, when grown, tries (and fails) to drown her nine-year-old son; and the third, when the young son, so traumatized by the previous attempts at murder/suicide/accident and other catastrophes in his young life loses his ability (or refuses) to speak. He, eventually, takes his father's 30-foot sailboat into the ocean alone, and almost drowns himself--albeit not intentionally. All of this is presumably a result of the "Maitland Curse."

Using the confusing device of four different narrators--each of the two daughters, Diana and Marnie, Diana's ex-husband, Quinn, and the young boy, Gil--we are told that the two daughters, while still young girls, were taken sailing by their mother who tried to drown Diana, then attempts suicide, while Marnie is accidentally knocked into the water.

The daughters are rescued in one location and the mother drifts southward and is picked up by a Florida fishing boat the next morning, and yet no one ever connects these two rescues with the sea disaster that created them. The mother because she is a screwball, then goes into hiding and is presumed drowned at sea.

When one of the daughters has a child of her own she takes him out into the ocean in her sailboat and tries to drown him. To add a third insult to these injuries when the boy is nine years old he takes a sailboat out and almost drowns himself. You would think these people would've learned to stay away from sailboats, but no, they show absolutely no ability to learn from previous misfortunes, probably because of the "Maitland Curse."

All of this is punctuated with psychobabble about repressed memories, sibling rivalry created by maternal favoritism, artistic symbolism, people whose traumas have rendered them speechless, paralyzed, psychotic and murderous, such as the mother, the grandfather and the young boy, and that all of them somehow manage to solve their psychological dilemmas and cure themselves, where professional therapists have been unsuccessful.

As if that was not enough we are expected to believe that a person, in this case the younger sister, Marnie, would leave her successful career in Arizona to come to South Carolina to help the young boy regain his speech. And why does she make this enormous sacrifice? Because she loves him, despite the fact that she has never met him.

I won't even mention the fact that the young boy is able to take a thirty-foot Catalina sailboat single-handedly from its slip, into the Intracoastal Waterway and out into the ocean with no mention of how he raises the mainsail, a tough job for even a strong man, or how he navigates the various markers, sea buoys, currents and other obstacles that have to be negotiated when running an inlet along the Atlantic coast.

Each of the 28 chapters and epilogue begins with a manipulated epigraph, so transparently forced in its symbolic intent that I had to laugh at some of them, especially those by celebrated authors such as Herman Melville, Lord Byron, John Keats, Jack London, Sir Isaac Newton and of course, the Bible.

With all due respect to those who enjoyed this book or have a favorable opinion of it; to me it's essentially a dime-store melodrama based upon a bunch of psychobabble, mixed with a landlubber's perceptions of sailing. As a psychologist and a sailor, I recognize that the author knows little or nothing about either subject and moreover has written a cliché-ridden, predictable, contrived, mystery that no one who really thinks about it would find plausible.

There is a BIG SECRET in this book. The author keeps alluding to the BIG SECRET page after page after page. I kept reading the book hoping she would finally reveal it. Unfortunately, I knew what the BIG SECRET was before the GREAT REVELATION. This might have been a better book if it had been shorter. Instead we are treated to page after page of Diana sniping at her sister and ex-husband and hinting at THE BIG SECRET. There are two characters who don't speak except that Granddad express himself by pointing out passages in the Bible that he just happens to have right in front of him. The ending is too convenient. This book was a waste of time.