by Jennifer McMahon
April 6, 2021
Publisher: Gallery/Scout Press
ASIN: B08BZVMGQC ISBN: 9781982153922
Be careful what you wish for.
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.
A haunting, twisty, and compulsively readable thrill ride from the author who Chris Bohjalian has dubbed the “literary descendant of Shirley Jackson,” The Drowning Kind is a modern-day ghost story that illuminates how the past, though sometimes forgotten, is never really far behind us.
This novel goes between two stories, one set now and one set in the early 20th Century, around the Thirties. The story begins with Jax, a social worker who learns her older sister, Lexie drowned in the pool of the house, Sparrow’s Crest, she had inherited from their grandmother. Her sister had been researching their family and the property the house stands on. A hotel with many strange legends and stories attached to it use to sit on the property. Soon scary things begin to happen and her sister’s ghost might be around.
The other story is about Ethel Monroe, whose husband, Will, brought her for a stay at the Brandenburg Springs Hotel in Brandenburg, Vermont. The woman had desperately wanted a baby, something that seemed to elude her and Will. She discovers a spring there that has unusual properties—ones that seem to heal. It is also considered cursed. And soon, Ethel, whispers to the water her wish for a daughter, one she had a dream about.
I was caught hook, line, and sinker, so to speak, to this tall muddy glass of unsettling gothic story of ghostly scares. It will make me think twice about getting a tub full of water.
I gave The Drowning Kind 5 Haunted Sheep
I was born in 1968 and grew up in my grandmother's house in suburban Connecticut, where I was convinced a ghost named Virgil lived in the attic. I wrote my first short story in third grade. I graduated with a BA from Goddard College in 1991 and then studied poetry for a year in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College. A poem turned into a story, which turned into a novel, and I decided to take some time to think about whether I wanted to write poetry or fiction. After bouncing around the country, I wound up back in Vermont, living in a cabin with no electricity, running water, or phone with my partner, Drea, while we built our own house. Over the years, I have been a house painter, farm worker, paste-up artist, Easter Bunny, pizza delivery person, homeless shelter staff member, and counselor for adults and kids with mental illness -- I quit my last real job in 2000 to work on writing full time. In 2004, I gave birth to our daughter, Zella. These days, we're living in an old Victorian in Montpelier, Vermont. Some neighbors think it looks like the Addams family house, which brings me immense pleasure.
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