Water – John Boyne

Published By: Doubleday
Pages: 176
Released On: 02/11/2023

The first thing Vanessa Carvin does when she arrives on the island is change her name. To the locals, she is Willow Hale, a solitary outsider escaping Dublin to live a hermetic existence in a small cottage, not a notorious woman on the run from her past.

But scandals follow like hunting dogs. And she has some questions of her own to answer. If her ex-husband is really the monster everyone says he is, then how complicit was she in his crimes?

Escaping her old life might seem like a good idea but the choices she has made throughout her marriage have consequences. Here, on the island, Vanessa must reflect on what she did – and did not do. Only then can she discover whether she is worthy of finding peace at all.

*****

Thanks to NetGalley and Doubleday for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.

Is there anyone who doesn’t fall in love with John Boyne’s work? I know there must be. No author is universally loved and praised. But I’ve never met nor heard from anyone who thinks anything other than awe at his work. And I’m so glad to see that this is only book one in a planned series.

It’s a difficult book for me to fully review to be honest. Short and concise but beautifully created. It’s a book that you can feel rather than read about. And so this review is short, in the hope it might whet your appetite enough to read it and experience it for yourself.

With a small page count and unassuming front cover, this book hides a deeply moving story written by a powerhouse of the written word.

It is tender and sensitive. John is an author who knows how to write beauty. Literal beauty, as well as the beauty in danger, the weather, the natural world, the houses, the land – it’s got so much poetry about it that I don’t see in anyone else.

It’s a very introverted piece of writing, very subtle. It doesn’t follow the plot vs character debate (as my readers know, I prefer character development over plot). Instead, it plods along – in the best way – allowing you to get enveloped in Vanessa’s backstory, her current, her regrets, her dreams etc. There are other characters from her past and her new present, and they all add a little thing to the story, but this is Vanessa’s story and she holds your attention from the very start to the very end.

It isn’t the easiest book to read. I don’t mean that in the actual way it’s written being difficult. But there are some difficult subjects, and in a book less than 200 pages long, it means it gets intense in parts. John hasn’t hidden from that, it’s all there in black and white, we can see the damage it does and the repercussions, they’re not sugar coated or watered down. They’re there and they’re hard. But he’s managed to balance that without it being too graphic. I’m not sure how he’s managed that balance, that sensitivity, but he excels it. Surprisingly, amongst all of that, there are moments of fun and humour and romance.

As with the others of his I’ve read, it’ll definitely go on my recommendations list.