‘The Waters’ ripples with secrets and lies in rural Michigan

Bonnie Jo Campbell proves her mastery of Midwestern Gothic in “The Waters,” a portrait of three generations of women living close to the land, and drawing power from it.

Bonnie Jo Campbell is a chief practitioner of Midwestern Gothic. Her last novel, “Once Upon a River,” earned her bestselling author status and comparisons to Mark Twain. But her heroine, Margo, wasn’t just a Great Lakes version of Huck Finn. Campbell understands rural Michigan down to its trillium roots. 

Her first novel in more than a decade, “The Waters” offers a portrait of a family of women intrinsic to the landscape. With its evocative descriptions of nature, the book practically sprouts in a reader’s hands.

Campbell begins like a fairy tale, in a house the crone Baba Yaga could have comfortably resided in. Hermine Zook, known as “Herself,” has raised three daughters on an island that can only be reached via a plank bridge. Herself is a healer, who in her youth prepared cures sweetened with blackberry and honey. Today, they are bitter. “It is said that the island, where healing waters percolate to the surface, was a place where women shared one another’s dreams, a place where women did what they wanted.”

Women doing what they want have frequently been called witches, and Campbell doesn’t shy away from the evil men do to women who live differently. The violence perpetrated on her characters is both matter-of-fact and generational. There’s another fairy tale, “Donkeyskin,” that offers clues to the secrets the Zook women must live with.

The novel opens with Rose Thorn, the youngest and most beautiful of the daughters, returning home with a daughter of her own for her mother to raise. Donkey, as she is known, absorbs wisdom from Herself, and loves everything about the island, including the shy rattlesnakes. Upending patrimony, the youngest daughter inherits everything.  

Lush, brackish, and bracing, “The Waters” is not so much read as steeped in.