Review: The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh

Title: The Water Cure
Author: Sophie Mackintosh
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Doubleday
Publish Date: January 8, 2019
Source: Library

What's the Story?:

From Goodreads.com: "King has tenderly staked out a territory for his wife and three daughters, Grace, Lia, and Sky. He has lain the barbed wire; he has anchored the buoys in the water; he has marked out a clear message: Do not enter. Or viewed from another angle: Not safe to leave. Here 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 their father, the only man they’ve ever seen, disappears, they retreat further inward until the day three strange men wash ashore. 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 confront the amorphous threat the strangers represent. Can they survive the men?"

My Two Cents:

"The Water Cure" is the story of three daughters, Grace, Lia, and Sky, who have always been protected from the world by their parents. When their father dies suddenly, he leaves behind his wife and his daughters to fend themselves from the world, a world that is very dangerous for women.

I was super intrigued by the premise of this book and oh, how I have loved the onslaught of new speculative and sci-fi fiction that seems to be cascading out of the book industry lately. I love when familiar things are turned on their head, which is certainly what you have here with "The Water Cure." The rules and norms in this book to include all of the rituals that the sisters are familiar with and go through in this book is fascinating.

World-building is always super important to me in speculative fiction. To me, this is where I was looking for more from this book. We get a sense of the world that the sisters are living in but I wanted to know the origin. I can't say much without giving anything away but a lot of the reality of how the world is is definitely left up to the reader to determine. I wanted more detail: How long had things been like this? How did things get to be like this?

This book had a lot of promise but I wanted to know more about the world in which this family lives in.