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I picked up this book for my book club. It came highly recommended but beyond that; I have no words.
Book Description
On an island in the Great Massasauga Swamp—an area known as “The Waters” to the residents of nearby Whiteheart, Michigan—herbalist Hermine “Herself” Zook has healed the local women of their ailments for generations. As stubborn as her tonics are powerful, Herself inspires reverence and fear in the people of Whiteheart, and even in her own three daughters. The youngest, beautiful and inscrutable Rose Thorn, has left her own daughter, eleven-year-old Dorothy “Donkey” Zook, to grow up wild.
Donkey spends her days searching for truths in the lush landscape and in her math books, waiting for her wayward mother and longing for a father, unaware that family secrets, passionate love, and violent men will flood through the swamp and upend her idyllic childhood.
With a “ruthless and precise eye for the details of the physical world” (New York Times Book Review), Bonnie Jo Campbell presents an elegant antidote to the dark side of masculinity, celebrating the resilience of nature and the brutality and sweetness of rural life.
About Bonnie Jo Campbell
Bonnie Jo Campbell is the bestselling author of six works of fiction, includingnbsp;The Waters,nbsp;Once Upon a River, andnbsp;Americannbsp;Salvage, a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, AWP's Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, and a Pushcart Prize, she lives outside Kalamazoo, Michigan, with donkeys.
My Thoughts
I picked up this book for my book club. It came highly recommended and as the author was new to me I wanted to branch out in my reading. However, I was not at all impressed with this book. I felt the author gave way too much detail about the setting, the people, and so forth so much so it became mind-numbing.
I can safely say the author knew the area very well that she was writing about and I did like that the book was about women but beyond that I couldn't find anything to like. She gave me no reason to like any of the characters. With so much information and detail given I lost sight of why or who the book was about.
I was hoping that at some point the author would focus on one character and give me something to like about them but it kept jumping from character to character. With all the details about everything else I wasn't given enough background on the character I thought was the main person which was Herione AKA Hersel but nope nothing. I had no clue who she really was, why she was living in Rose Cottage, or why she even chose to have children. Nothing. I wasn't even given much about the daughters except that everyone loved Rose.
In the end, I found I had to force myself to read this book. I could only handle about a chapter a day before it just got so boring I would fall asleep. I so wanted to love this book as the synopsis sounded so good but in the end, it was a huge disappointment. I am not even sure I know what the book was even about as there was so much going on I could not keep track of all the people.
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