Things We Found When the Water Went Down

De: Tegan Nia Swanson

Narrado por: Ann Richardson

In this dark and ethereal debut novel, a young woman tries to make sense of strange artifacts and unsettling memories in an effort to find her mother—missing since being accused of murder

When brutish miner Hugo Mitchum is found murdered on the frozen shore of a North Country lake, the local officials and town gossips of Beau Caelais are quick to blame Marietta Abernathy, outspoken environmental activist and angry, witchy recluse. But Marietta herself has disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

Living on an isolated island with her father, Marietta's sixteen-year-old daughter, Lena, begins sifting through her mother's journals and collected oddities in an attempt to find her. While her father's grief threatens to consume him and her adoptive aunt Bea reckons with guilt and acceptance, it is the haunting town outcast Ellis Olsen who might have the most to lose if Lena fails to find her mother.

A Nordic eco-noir shot through with magical realism, Things We Found When the Water Went Down examines power, identity, and myth in a story that asks us to explore what it means to heal—or not—after violence.

©2022 Tegan Nia Swanson (P)2022 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Layout/Style Was VERY Difficult To Follow For Me …

Wow! Unfortunately, this is NOT my kind of book! And it has nothing to with underlying story, but more to with the writing style and layout. Okay, so first of all, I should say that I didn’t pick this book for myself at all & would probably not have picked it up at all if I hadn’t read it as part of a book club & it wasn’t my pick at all. In general, I’m not really a magical realism fan (not judging you if that’s your type of genre or anything; it’s just not for me). And, to be honest, if it wasn’t for the book club (and listening to the audiobook while reading it), I’d probably have given up on it before even finishing it (and that’s not something I do very often, either, trust me). Seriously, though if it wasn’t for the audiobook, I’d probably would have gotten lost multiple times while reading it! I actually DID get lost a few times! The layout and structure was very strange—to me, at least—and it seemed to not follow basic grammar rules & sentence structure a lot of the time (I am kinda a stickler for basic grammar rules). (I DO want to say that I was mostly reading the Kindle edition on my phone/iPad, so I don’t know what structure/layout the paperback/hardcover had, but I imagine it to be pretty the same.) There were only, like, 1 or 2 things I liked about the book (thus, giving it 2 stars instead of just just 1, or 0 stars). And I will also say that it deals with sexual abuse/assault, so there’s your TW for you.