Into the Water by Ruth Waring

Into the Water by Paula Hawkins

Raise your hand if you loved Girl on a Train. Keep your hand up if you’d be interested in more books by Ruth Waring.

Because you should be interested in more books by Ruth Waring.

It’s not so much an order as much as a need. You need balance in your life. Normal novels, romance novels, comedy, and crazy as CRAP novels. This novel balances your life out.

I just finished the week after my fall break, which the week after a break is generally barbaric in the education world. Fall Break wasn’t a magical block of space for much but it was for reading. I read until my eyeballs threatened to divorce me.

And one of the books I read (in two sittings) was Into the Water. The narrator’s sister turned up dead, so she had to make her way back to her hometown that she swore she’d never return to in order to retrieve her sister’s daughter and go about the funeral arrangements. The way the narrator saunters through her childhood home at the opening of the book as if she’s walking through figments of time takes you into the four walls of memorabilia and dust and the smell of suspicion. The words transport you into an abyss the characters take turns creating for the reader to go down.

Each character is somehow linked to the death of her sister, or to someone who died in a mysterious pool down by the river. Each character uses their past and their present and tries to somehow convince the reader their hands are clean in their own way, while the reader remains suspicious of everyone. This handiwork is all created while telling the stories of the people of a small town affected by a supposedly cursed pool.

And I am here to tell you: you want to read this novel. The truth lies in the collision of past, present, confessions, and afterthoughts of what happened to the narrator’s sister, what happened to the victims of the pool, the truth of character of the characters. It all lies in the collision of time. I highly recommend this read. My dachshunds, however, would probably tell you they were catastrophically neglected for the three hours it took their mother to finish reading and processing. Oh the woes of being a spoiled dachshund.