The Memory of Water

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!

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 *** "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 Maitlan

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.

I don't know which I enjoyed more: the gorgeous descriptions that Karen White uses to place the reader so vividly in Carolina's Low Country, or the surprising plot twists that make you keep turning those pages! She tells an emotional story using the voices of four different characters, deftly moving between them so that each one adds to the narrative in a unique and moving way. The emotional intensity of the story combined with the beauty of the prose reminded me of "The Prince of Tides" (minus Conroy's over-the-top violence). This is a gripping but lyrical, superbly well-written and enjoyable book.