In The Water Cure, three sisters live with their mother and father on an island cut off from the rest of the world. They are taught from a young age that women must be protected from the terror and violence of men, and that the real world is filled with toxins that would degrade and sicken them. When their father disappears and two men and a boy show up on their island, their lives upend. What follows for the sisters is the slow disintegration of their lives that they have always feared.
The story is divided into three parts, and I found the first two to be decent, though not great. The prose is dreamlike and evocative, filled with lots of feelings and thoughts. We spend a lot of time getting to know the cruel punishments and rituals their parents subject them to in order to cleanse their bodies and minds and be rid of the world's toxins. But then I got to the third part, and it completely fell apart for me.
This book has an extremely simplistic and pessimistic view of the genders. Women are universally awesome and filled with the spirit of love and sisterhood; men are irredeemably bad from the moment of their births. It completely disregards individuality. Every person fits in one or the other gender, and they surely must act in accordance with that, without any ability to think for themselves. It's an extremely tribalistic view of "us versus them", and in our world today, we need less of that thinking, not more.
Though it's laid out as a story of redemption, it doesn't feel that way to me. Rather, the message seems to be that you are what your parents teach you, and you can never grow to be more than that. There's no hope of figuring out your own mind or your own wishes. And that translates to not having to take responsibility for one's own actions. The book essentially says that their parents and their circumstances made the sisters into who they are, and as a result, they are not responsible for the bad things they do onto others. Just... no.
I'm appalled by the violence and complete disregard that the three women have for others, which is disguised as righteousness. In the end, what are the men's heinous crimes? Well, it's to love and leave. Sure, that is unkind, but it's not deserving of death or torture. It's also not deserving of the women living in constant fear or acting so hysterical throughout.
If the gender roles in this book were reversed, I can't imagine this book would be allowed to be published. Women would be up in arms over the misogyny. This book is marked as feminist, but it isn't. It's making mountains out of molehills and being as purposefully hurt as possible over small slights. It's being cruel to a group of people, to those you would label as "others" who are different from yourself. And that's not ok.
In the end, I strongly disagree with the message of this book. As someone who, like almost everyone out there, has had the painful experience of being lumped into a group and seen as a stereotype rather than an individual, I just don't understand or agree with the spirit of this story.
Readaroo Rating: 1 star
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