The Waters

Written by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Narrated by Lili Taylor

A master of rural noir returns with a fierce, mesmerizing novel about exceptional women and the soul of a small town.

On an island in the Great Massasauga Swamp—an area known as “The Waters” to the residents of nearby Whiteheart, Michigan—herbalist and eccentric 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 estranged daughters. The youngest—the beautiful, inscrutable, and lazy 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. Rage simmers below the surface of this divided community, and those on both sides of the divide have closed their doors against the enemy. The only bridge across the waters is Rose Thorn.

With a “ruthless and precise eye for the details of the physical world” (Jane Smiley, 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.

"Bonnie Jo Campbell’s The Waters is a novel, a living myth, and a place. …
Imagine a mash-up of Flannery O’Connor and the Brothers Grimm, of Angela Carter’s reimagined fairy tales and William Faulkner’s gothic sublime. And yet, The Waters is all Bonnie Jo. …"—DIANE SEUSS, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Frank: Sonnets

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 9, 2024
• ISBN: 9798891781641

Bonnie Jo Campbell

Bonnie Jo Campbell is the bestselling author of six works of fiction, including The Waters, Once Upon a River, and American 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.

Reviews for The Waters

[Karissa Williams · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I don’t know how to rate this…Campbell’s story and prose are masterful. But Lily Taylor’s reading needs a ton of post work. She pronounces Massasauga differently throughout the first few chapters, eventually settling on a 3-syllable, incorrect pronunciation of this 4-syllable word. She pronounces “Artesian” properly once, then reverts to “artisan.” Her phrasing is confusing…she reads as if every line of text is the end of a sentence, then picks up again as if the next word is a new sentence. In the epilogue, the same sentence is read twice in a row, and not by design (I checked the book to be sure). At one point, background noises are clearly audible. Whomever directed/produced/coached her did a very poor job. So, while the story is AMAZING…listening to this version of it was frustrating and rather a chore. If you have time to read rather than listen, I HIGHLY recommend going that route!