Book Review: Sister Water

Title: Sister Water

(What I have is the hardcover edition. What Amazon wanted you to see is, for no obvious reason, the paperback--I think the Amazon link may steer you to the hardcover edition.)

Author: Nancy Willard

Date: 1993

Publisher: Knopf

ISBN: 0-679-40702-2

Length: 255 pages

Quote: “Even when Ellen was a child, her mother loved to hide.”

Now Ellen’s mother is slipping away into senility. Ellen, a young mother and widow, is getting to know two men who seem to embody two of the different subcultures into which some baby-boomers used to like to separate ourselves. Harvey is the Yuppie, a realtor who wants to turn the local natural history museum into a shopping mall; Sam is the Bobo, a veterinary student who wants to be the responsible adult in the house with Ellen’s mother and son while Ellen works.

The Huron River flows through all the characters’ consciousness, constantly. Everyone but Harvey is sensitive to natural beauty and attuned to St. Francis’s Canticle. Both Sam and Harvey are haunted by the image of a drowned woman. Both remember having seen her, although they didn’t notice each other at the time; how they related to this woman, living and dead, seems to sum up the moral judgments Bobos liked to pass on Yuppies.

Sam’s defense against the false accusation that he killed the woman is what eventually reveals how she came to die, but Sister Water is not your usual murder mystery. Willard is a poet; her stories are always filled with poetic resonance of thought and image. In Sister Water an angel, a “Dog Star Man,” a little town called Drowning Bear, wild rice harvesters, Petoskey stones, American Buddhist health food, playgrounds, pet cats, and more are woven into a luminous, even  numinous, densely patterned, pleasing tapestry that suggests reflections at whatever depth readers want to explore. This review will stop at a relatively shallow level and say that Sister Water is an intensely topophilic love letter to Michigan and Wisconsin.

If you’re looking for a novel that gives you the feeling of visiting a real place and meeting real people that you’ll never really visit, but you’d like to, then Sister Water is for you.

I was disappointed to learn that Willard no longer has any use for the dollar she or her charity would get if this one were a Fair Trade Book. You can, however, add Fair Trade Books to the package along with this one and encourage a living writer. To buy Sister Water (and/or Things Invisible to See, and/or other books of similar size), please send $5 per book + $5 per package + $1 per online payment to the appropriate address at the bottom of the screen.