The Waters (Bonnie Jo Campbell) takes place in Michigan, written by a Michigan author. It’s not the Michigan where I grew up, amidst the sprawling suburban tangle branching outward from Detroit. Growing up in the suburbs of a city much-maligned during my youth felt strange, a safe cushion outside of a city known at the time for its murder rate more than Motown. Strip malls and bike rides and schools stocked with current textbooks and programs like Clue-Me-In (book Jeopardy! at its finest) and Science Olympiads and Krypto tournaments, a math game so fun even I liked it.
Campbell’s Michigan isn’t that, nor is it the crumbling majesty of Detroit, nor the careful rejuvenation that still feels tentative, like if you look too closely the sports stadiums and grocery stores will retreat back to the suburbs. Campbell writes of small town Michigan, where a Native American medicine woman can be both frequented and feared by the community, where men throw rifles in their truck beds and farm the crops that make the most profit rather than the ones that may be best for the earth.
The Waters centers on a starkly matriarchal family, mainly told by the youngest Zook daughter. Dorothy, called Donkey in all the ways that matter, lives on a swampy island with Hermine Zook, called Herself. Herself’s three daughters lives in various states, both geographically and figuratively, from California to Nowhere, Michigan, the land surrounding the tiny island. Donkey’s mother, Rose Thorn, stretches between California and Nowhere, though we know little of herself in California, where she sometimes lives with the eldest Zook daughter, Primrose. Molly, the middle child, works as a nurse and desperately wants her mother and niece to get off the island and into the boarded up home of Herself’s long-banished husband, Wild Will.
Herself simply wants to be where she has always been, finding healing medicine in the plants around her, both the innocent ones and the poisonous ones, and the animals around her, milk from her cow and donkeys and venom from the state-protected Muck Rattlers hiding around the island. Unfortunately, the town’s acceptance of Herself teeters back and forth, depending on whether the people around her consider her a healer or an abortionist.
Rose Thorn holds the town’s acceptance of her mother to her heart, shaping it with an innate ability to create community where despair might otherwise grow. Unfortunately, her own secrets and the way they pull at both her daughter and her long-time lover, don’t always fit with what the town needs or wants from the Zook women.
Her daughter, Donkey, mostly wants to go to school to learn math, a subject she’s discovering deeply without any formal schooling at all.
If this sounds a bit like a fairy tale, that feels necessary, because it reads like one, too.
I wasn’t sure what I expected from The Waters, a book with a beautiful cover hiding terrible truths — and beautiful ones, too. I loved it, though, this look at the magic found in the wildlife around us, even when the wildlife wears human forms. The appeal of Campbell’s Michigan isn’t lost on me entirely, though I appreciate it more in book form than the actuality of heating washing water on the stove. I loved the references to Frank Baum’s Oz books, and not just the most familiar story of Dorothy and her friends. It feels lucky that I read this so close to my re-watch of Return to Oz, or some of the allusions would have been lost to the part of my brain that remembers the 80s in fits and starts.
I would definitely recommend this to all sorts of readers, especially my Michigan friends who appreciate the quiet unfolding of women’s fiction and complicated family stories, but also those who yearn for a moving plot and quirky characters. It’s not necessarily a happy story, but small towns aren’t necessarily happy places, and Campbell finds beauty in that as well.
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