Kayla Reviews THE DROWNING KIND

Summary:

When social worker Jax receives nine missed calls from her older sister, Lexie, she assumes that it’s just another one of her sister’s episodes. Manic and increasingly out of touch with reality, Lexie has pushed Jax away for over a year. But the next day, Lexie is dead: drowned in the pool at their grandmother’s estate. When Jax arrives at the house to go through her sister’s things, she learns that Lexie was researching the history of their family and the property. And as she dives deeper into the research herself, she discovers that the land holds a far darker past than she could have ever imagined.

In 1929, thirty-seven-year-old newlywed Ethel Monroe hopes desperately for a baby. In an effort to distract her, her husband whisks her away on a trip to Vermont, where a natural spring is showcased by the newest and most modern hotel in the Northeast. Once there, Ethel learns that the water is rumored to grant wishes, never suspecting that the spring takes in equal measure to what it gives. 

My Take:

If you’ve never read a book by Jennifer McMahon, you’re really missing out. Honestly, each of her books are an experience more that simply a nice quiet read. She has a way of blurring the lines between fact and fiction, real and surreal that makes her stories at once eerie and breath-taking.

It’s hard to really put my finger on what this novel is about because it covers so many difficult thematic ideas such as family, guilt, grief, loss, and superstition. By the end of the novel, you won’t be sure who or what to believe, and that twist is an absolute gut-punch.

More than anything, this story is about the relationship between two sisters–the mentally-ill Lexie who dies drowning in the swimming pull at the beginning of the novel and the guilt-ridden Jax who has to deal with the aftermath of her sister’s death.

My only complaint about this one is that I simply enjoyed McMahon’s other novel’s better. However, I think that is a personal preferance more than any issue on the part of the writer.

If you love stories of family, you will love this one.