Comment

Apr 09, 2020
JOANNE'S MYSTERY PICKS I’m not sure what those people who’ve put Hawkins’ latest book to the top of the bestsellers list for upwards of 7 weeks see in it. I found it to be confusing, convoluted, and at times even misleading. The story revolves around the drowning deaths of a number of women in a British town. It’s believed by the people of the town that the river has some power that draws women to it – magic, or witchcraft – but this point is never fully discussed or explained. The novel is peopled with so many characters that it’s difficult to keep them straight and I found that I was constantly flipping back and forth in the book to figure out “whose sister was whose” and where “so and so” fit in the family. Sometimes a character is mentioned briefly and then never appears in the novel again, leaving the reader to wonder what purpose they even had in the telling of the story. Hawkins sends us off on tangents that leave us shaking our heads and red herrings that take us nowhere. I’m still trying to figure out what her reference to “Adam and Eve and dinosaurs” is all about! This novel left me disappointed and unsatisfied, which are the opposite feelings that I had after reading her first novel, “The Girl on the Train”. Give “Into the Water” a miss – there are many well-written stories out there that will be much more rewarding to read than this one.