cover image Water

Water

Sue Thomas. Overlook Press, $21.95 (240pp) ISBN 978-0-87951-532-4

A low-key, autumnal tone hums through this slim mother-daughter novel set in England. Ruth is a history teacher who can breathe life into the stones of abandoned churchyards. Drenched in loneliness, she turns her imagination to conjuring a sea spirit to warm her heart and bed. Her sulky teenaged daughter Julie has one foot tipped into womanhood, the other planted firmly in a childhood scarred by Ruth's oddities and her father Simon's early desertion. This secretive relationship between mother and daughter becomes increasingly uncomfortable until Julie goes off to join the world and kill her father, leaving Ruth to retreat further into fantasy. Water laps around and channels through each scene, sometimes turning up in heavy-handed metaphors and other times forming delicate, sensual images or weaving myth into the thin plot lines. Thomas ( Correspondence ) veers between dark-tinged, poetic visions and rather clunky prose that unpins her grip on the imagination. (Apr.)