Aptly named patriarch King repairs to an island with his wife and daughters to escape an unnamed cataclysm. Even though for a time they welcomed castaway women, the daughters are taught to fear strangers, especially men, who are considered toxic. This insular, hothouse environment, though meant to protect the girls, also sequesters them from being able to adjudge their parents' stringent "exercises" as little more than torture. When King disappears, the daughters' carefully crafted world begins to crumble, and emotions (which the exercises were meant to curb) bubble up. When three related males arrive in King's wake, the sisters, formerly bound in love-hate lockstep, find their sisterhood weakening as each female sorts out events. The slow unfurling of the truth of their lives parallels the daughters' slow awakening to the realities of the world. In Mackintosh's skilled hands, readers encounter this world as if in a fever dream and float on its characters' disparate and shifting points of view. Book clubs may enjoy discussing the dystopian and feminist themes of Mackintosh's exciting debut.--Joan Curbow Copyright 2018 Booklist

Three sisters, secreted away during a global crisis of male violence, learn to fight for their survival in this spare, dystopian debut.Grace, Lia, and Sky follow the rituals enforced by their mother and their father, King, the only man they've ever known. The strange family lives in an isolated, crumbling mansion by the sea, where women arrive to receive the family's storied water cures and heal from violent pasts. They look like "they had been bled out, their skin limp. Eyes watering involuntarily, hair thinning," recalls Lia, and the sisters learn to fear a world that visits so much violence on its women. There are water cures for everything: to purify toxins from the outside world, illness, grief, too much feeling. The rituals themselves are often violent, requiring drowning or self-harm. When the novel opens, the sisters are mourning the death of King and the discovery of Grace's pregnancy, which disrupts their harmony and fractures their routines. To complicate matters, three men wash up on shore and beg for entry. Met with deep suspicion and relegated to the beach, the men become figures of both fascination and fear. Mackintosh alternates between the sisters' collective voices and the heartbreaking narratives of Grace and Lia. Despite being warned by her sisters and mother to stay away, Lia begins her first love affair with Llew, who is by turns charming, careless, and cruel. Grace gives birth to King's stillborn baby boy, an experience that isolates her from her younger sisters and her mother, who inexplicably disappears. While the narrative at times veers toward the pedantic, it's both shocking and refreshing to see the observations women make to one anotherabout the specific, learned cruelties and emotional violence of menrepresented so plainly on the page. "It was no one big thing but many small things," one of the patients writes in the house Welcome Book. "Each one chipped away at me. By the end, I felt skinless." Ultimately, Grace, Lia, and Sky must make a choice: to trust the men or to save one another.An evocative coming-of-age novel that captures the fear, rage, and yearning of three women growing up in a time of heightened violence. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Mackintosh's intense, ambitious debut, longlisted for the Man Booker, evokes a feminist dystopia where three sisters live in isolation meant to protect them from a toxic world that has become particularly dangerous for women. At an unspecified time in the future, global warming and pollution have poisoned the planet, making men more violent and women vulnerable. One couple, King and Mother, choose to raise their three daughters surrounded by sea and barbwire; their only visitors are women seeking therapies like the water cure (near-drowning to fortify against toxins and fear). Mother teaches her daughters-caustic 20-something Grace, touch-hungry teenage Lia, and their youngest, Sky-to suppress emotions, love only each other, and prepare for the worst. Then King disappears, and two men and a boy wash ashore. Mother shows her daughters how to use a pistol before she too disappears. Grace, Lia, and Sky are left to fend for themselves as the men grow impatient, proprietary, and threatening. The sisters' impressionistic narratives, presented solo and in chorus, show Lia's self-mutilation in close-up while the world disorder is described indirectly through its aftereffects. Mackintosh's gripping novel is vicious in its depiction of victimhood, vibrant when victims transform into warriors, and full of outrage at patriarchal power, environmental devastation, and the dehumanization of women. (Jan.) c Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

IN MOST APOCALYPTIC TALES, the reader is expected to accept certain baseline assumptions. The first is that the apocalypse is real; the second, that the story's main characters represent its truest victims. Sophie Mackintosh subverts both of these assumptions in her sumptuous yet sparsely written debut, "The Water Cure," which was longlisted for last year's Man Booker Prize. On an island somewhere near a mainland, three girls grow up under the care of their father, called King, and their nameless mother. King seeks to keep them all safe from a peculiar plague that, among other things, makes women effectively allergic to men. Nearly everything in the preceding sentence is questionable, however - including the nature of King's fatherly love, as it immediately becomes clear that his oldest daughter, Grace, is pregnant by him. This questionable love also plays out via bizarre "therapies" to which the three girls are subjected in order to purify them of unspecified toxins. The girls are kept on a strange diet and made to sweat themselves into unconsciousness in saunas, freeze their hands in buckets of ice water, hold their breath until they pass out. Knowing no better, they are willing participants; to them, this is the only safe love, given that they have been taught to fear strangers - especially men. Men other than King, that is. In one of the cruelest therapies, the family "draws the irons," small tokens that determine who among them is permitted to be the focus of the others' love. Middle girl Lia is the one most often left love-deficient - which has devastating effects when King vanishes and, later, three strangers come to the island. The strangers are two adult men and a young boy, apparent refugees from whatever is happening on the mainland. When one of the men shows sexual interest in Lia, she responds with greedy desperation, and all three sisters react through the warped and violent lens of what love means to them. So is this an apocalyptic tale of women surviving in a world that has turned strange and cruel? Perhaps more a tale of patriarchal family structures taken to an extreme - the father as both predator and god, the mother a collaborator who occasionally protects, all three daughters hovering in a limbo somewhere between cherished possessions and future concubines for the patriarch. There is also a distinctly cultlike element to the family dynamics, from the myths that both parents weave in order to maintain control, to the unquestioning relentlessness shown by Sky, the coddled youngest daughter, whenever something threatens the family home. It's this cultishness that muddies the thematic waters of this novel. At first glance "The Water Cure" seems to be in conversation with Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale," or 1970s feminist dystopias like Suzy McKee Charnas's Holdfast Chronicles or Sheri S. Tepper's "The Gate to Women's Country." In the latter books, women's physical weakness encourages male excess, which puts the whole species at risk. As King and Mother frequently remind their daughters, women's bodies are inherently fragile and vulnerable to corruption. Yet the unspoken interstices of the story, to which Mackintosh delicately draws the reader's attention with haunting, oblique prose, emphasize just how much hogwash the parents are feeding their daughters. The reader knows, for example, that love is limitless and need not be counted out like coins; that physical and sexual abuse can only warp what love there is; and that the daughters' ignorance of the wider world keeps them as dependent as it does pure. "You girls are a new and shining kind of woman," King tells them, proudly - after he has raised them vitamin-deficient and weakened by his therapies, and ignorant of basic human biology. Their isolation is a privilege and their ignorance is innocence, or so they are told. So they believe. But it is increasingly clear to the reader that these young women have simply been raised to fit their patriarch's ideal of what pure, fragile, privileged white womanhood should be. (Since, after all, the notion that women are fragile and in need of protection to maintain purity is not accorded to all women.) But what King has actually created on his island are three young women who are trained to privation, and who - lacking anything but his myths to believe in - are frighteningly focused on their own survival. Foot soldiers. How much money must King have had, to own a house off the grid and keep a family of five supplied for decades? The family does get some income, it is implied, by treating women from the mainland who come seeking therapies, including the "water cure" of the title. But since the reader also knows that being drowned has never cured women of anything - quite the opposite - we are left to wonder what King has told these women, and why they believe him. And how powerful that belief must be, since sometimes the cure seems to be effective. Then again, faith healing always has a few success stories. That's how the con works. What is patriarchy, after all, but a con being run on all genders, whispering to both victims and beneficiaries that any suffering they experience is for their own good? Until the followers start to realize they've been had. Perhaps their rage can be a kind of cure, too - one that's hopefully more effective than drowning. The girls hover in a limbo somewhere between cherished possessions and future concubines. N. K. jemisin is a three-time Hugo winner. Her short-story collection, "How Long 'Til Black Future Month?," was published in November.

DEBUT This first novel from award-winning short story writer Mackintosh is set on the edge of a postapocalyptic world. Three sisters, Grace, Lia, and Sky, live in a moldering spa hotel with their mother and a father called King. The parents have kept the young women isolated from the mainland, where environmental toxicity and gender wars have ravaged the female population; Grace's pregnancy can only be the result of incest. The hotel somehow has running water and a pool, and the girls languish in shabby luxury. Occasionally, damaged women arrive on the shore, and the mother gives them a water cure, which involves salt water purges and muslin wraps. The tension ratchets up when King fails to return from a trip to the mainland for provisions, and their insulated women's world is violated when two men and a boy wash up on the beach. VERDICT This image-laden and lyrical first novel, its short chapters interspersed with brief, disturbing messages from women from the mainland, imagines a societal breakdown that has inflicted most of its harm on women, which seems both frightening and inevitable, offering a dark, extended ­metaphor on toxic male/female relations. [See Prepub Alert, 7/9/18.]-Reba Leiding, emerita, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.