The Memory of Water

Customer Reviews

• One of the best I have read this year...  Jul 11, 2008 (20 of 21 found this helpful)

  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!
  
  

• A Haunting tale  Apr 7, 2008 (11 of 12 found this helpful)

  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.
  

• strong family drama  Mar 6, 2008 (9 of 10 found this helpful)

  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
  
  
  
  

• Amazing Family Drama  Mar 31, 2008 (6 of 6 found this helpful)

  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.

• Richly evocative family story: Southern Gothic   May 9, 2008 (7 of 8 found this helpful)

  
  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
  
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  "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 j