High Water

By: Lynn Hightower

Narrated by: Gabrielle De Cuir

Length: 11 hrs and 29 mins

Publisher's summary

Beaufort, South Carolina is home to the Smallwoods, a family closely knit but fiercely at odds. Georgie, the youngest, is tormented by worry for her son, who vanished two years earlier, and by her anger at her father. An unforgiving patriarch and ex-Marine, Georgie's father neglects her mother, belittles her brother Ashby, and denies her sister Claire the financial support she needs after a trying divorce. When their mother dies suddenly and Georgie's son returns home on the same day, tensions rise between the siblings, and Georgie begins to suspect their father had a role in both their mother's death and her son's disappearance.

©2002 Henry Holt & Co. (P)2002 Audio Literature

Critic reviews

"Lynn Hightower is a major talent." (Jonathan Kellerman)
"[Hightower's] pacing is brisk, her characters well drawn and credibly flawed, and her plotting diabolically intriguing from start to finish." (Publishers Weekly)

Fantastic book!!!

The best book Hightower has ever written. Gripping. And sad. This family could be EveryFamily in that it shows how very badly things can go wrong between people who deeply care about each other.

A Novel I Wanted To Like But Couldn't

It bothers me that I didn't like this book more. It has all the makings of an intriguing mystery and has prose that borders on poetry. Yet I can't help feeling the author was having trouble staying focused and ended up writing another book. High Water is ethereal in substance and this makes it difficult to buy as credible. I kept waiting for the narrator to laugh aloud and say "Gotcha! April Fools!"

The narrator has a beautiful voice but didn't sound comfortable with the realistic aspects of the book. She would make a great orator and/or poet, but her dramatic quality is disturbing for a reader of concrete fiction.

I'm not sorry I listened to this book because it made me think and that's always a happening for which a reader should be grateful. Still, I would have liked more.

Fake Southern Accent

I was going to buy this book but was not even able to listen to the entire sample. The southern accent was so incredibly fake and in South Carolina we do not pronounce Beaufort the way the narrator does. It's pronounced the same way you would pronounce Buford. I think I'll get the book and read it with my own real southern accent. If you are from the south be forewarned that the accent is terribly fake and may be difficult to listen to.