Class: VIII-B
Name of book: Into The Water
Author of book: Paula Hawkings
Summary: The story and plot are related by 11 characters in a collage of first person and third person accounts. Two police personnel: Erin and Sean. Lena and Josh, Katie’s 11-year old brother. Nickie, the local ‘witch’, and her sister Jennie, the erstwhile police woman. Helen, the headmistress, Sean’s wife, and Sean’s father, Patrick. Mark Henderson, a teacher in the school Katie and Lena attended. Katie’s mother, Julia, and her father.
Mystery, mysticism and magic are woven into the narrative. Half-heard voices, half-seen images, half-felt touches; and beneath them, all the time, every moment, and beneath every word, you feel the water in the drowning pool moving, like a living thing, glassily gleaming, slyly smiling.
Every time the reader feels that she has reached the end of the maze, she sees another turn or dead end in it. And so on. And so on. Until the very end.
The book touched a very visceral part of me. It is one of those books that you finish reading, and then stare at the wall, wondering what you will do for the rest of your life. Estranged sisters. Magic and mysticism. Elemental forces at work in ways that are odd and un settling. Silence. A lot of silence; and the sounds that interrupt it, sharp, and blood curdling.
But the sounds that you hear are not always external, or physical. They reflect the sounds that the mind makes, and the heart hears.
What stays in the mind for the longest time, is the way the author lovingly paints every nuance of a woman’s mind. Not what the world thinks she should be, but what she really is…passionate, lustful, terrifying, amusing, irreverent, compassionate.
Sadly, the Wikipedia page detailing the book, is not only replete with grammatical and syntactical errors. The way the plot is related would kill any interest in the book. Which is a pity.
Read ‘Into the Water’, for the truth. Read it for the love. Read it for its re iteration to stay in touch, and keep connected. Read it if you are a woman, and you are not afraid of looking into a mirror. Read it if you are a man who does not try to ‘change’ women.
