STILL WATERS - Camilla Noli

Normally I'd try to avoid doing this but I feel that I have to declare up front - I did not like this book.  Didn't enjoy it for one second - nothing in it was interesting, appealing or even remotely engaging.  So having said that, why?

 

One of the things that appeals to me least of anything in any books I read is blatant manipulation of a reader's emotional reactions - fortunately for me there's nothing in STILL WATERS that engendered any emotional reaction (other than boredom), so the manipulation could be seen for what it was.  We start with a mother, lovingly engaging with a new baby boy.  We have the difficult older child - a girl.  Maybe it's unconscious but it came across as a fairly blatant juxtaposition of the sexes.  Then we obviously needed a remote, cold father figure - more emotionally connected to the children than his wife, seemingly completely unaware of his wife's isolation.  And finally the wife - mother, a woman with some serious psychological problems and, for good measure, her own distant and cold mother to rub in the feelings of inadequacy.

 

So we have our cast of the good and the bad, set up in a manner that is obviously laying out what's to come with the rest of the book.  And there are absolutely and utterly no surprises.  The manipulation continues on - through the unnamed mother's actions (against everything that is seemingly "right" for a mother to do); with nobody else realising what is going on - ever!  We then have the final twist which is supposed to make you question everything you have understood about that unnamed mother.

 

Obviously none of this lack of connection was at all helped by associated publicity blurbs that come with the book where the author says the book is exploring the idea that not all women are naturally maternal or nurturing.  It came as somewhat of a surprise that we'd obviously be better off being psychopathic killers.