The Waters
By Bonnie Jo Campbell
W. W. Norton & Company, January 9, 2024
The Today show’s January 2024 Read with Jenna pick!
A master of rural noir returns with a fierce, mesmerizing novel about exceptional women and the soul of a small town.
On an island in the Great Massasauga Swamp—an area known as “The Waters” to the residents of nearby Whiteheart, Michigan—herbalist Hermine “Herself” Zook has healed the local women of their ailments for generations. As stubborn as her tonics are powerful, Herself inspires reverence and fear in the people of Whiteheart, and even in her own three daughters. The youngest, beautiful and inscrutable Rose Thorn, has left her own daughter, eleven-year-old Dorothy “Donkey” Zook, to grow up wild. Donkey spends her days searching for truths in the lush landscape and in her math books, waiting for her wayward mother and longing for a father, unaware that family secrets, passionate love, and violent men will flood through the swamp and upend her idyllic childhood.
With a “ruthless and precise eye for the details of the physical world” (New York Times Book Review), Bonnie Jo Campbell presents an elegant antidote to the dark side of masculinity, celebrating the resilience of nature and the brutality and sweetness of rural life.
Selected Praise
"Bonnie Jo Campbell is a master of rural America’s postindustrial landscape." ―Boston Globe, on Mothers, Tell Your Daughters
"Like the women in her stories, Campbell’s prose can be watchful and viscerally alive." ―New York Times Book Review, on Mothers, Tell Your Daughters
"The book thrums with powerful young women." ―Chicago Tribune, on Mothers, Tell Your Daughters
"With grit and reverence, this story collection is gorgeous in its honesty." ― Marie Claire, on Mothers, Tell Your Daughters
About the Author
Bonnie Jo Campbell, a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the recipient of the AWP’s Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction and a Pushcart Prize, lives outside Kalamazoo, Michigan, with donkeys.