A thoroughly nasty take on the lot of women and the inability of human-kind to care for one another .

A book about selfishness and harm that masquerades as a world where those things do not come from (or amount to) evil just individual moral failures ?

When an author attempts a story focused on the narrative perspective of another race or gender for his protagonists he risks introducing a layer of artificiality or dramatic lie to his story.

This author slips on the cloak of the other and writes out a story where women are not just the victims of some unavoidable original sin but also it's perpetrators generation after generation .

His primary black characters are granted a perverse awareness of their plight but afforded no solace here on earth .

Seems as though the act of imagining the perspective of a woman is so hateful to him that he makes their 'sins' and punishments unavoidable and unforgivable .

one question presented here is whether brutal landscapes create selfish or self-reliant people - another question might be whether writing about brutal landscapes and events justifies the self righteous writing that comes from peopling such a world with women such as these ?






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I'm giving this book only 2 stars because I found the story kind of boring. It was so difficult to figure out what was happening in the plot. The story switched between two time periods, but this wasn't very obvious in the beginning. I didn't really get to know the characters or frankly care about any of them. ( )

An unsettling meditation on isolation and interdependence. The narrative is at times disjointed and rambling, and the characters are for the most part unlikable and difficult to connect with. What I came away with from this novel was a greater appreciation for the Outer Banks of North Carolina. ( )

Saw a sentence in the book club notes - book is sometimes referred to as historical fiction, mystery and a long poem.
I vote for the long poem.
Wow - an interesting group of characters. Enjoyed the echoing events of the first generations and the contemporary events. Although these echoes and same names could cause some confusion. Pencil a note as you start the chapters to keep the family trees straight and no problem.
Loved the lyrical depictions of the island and the unspoken communications the author was able to portray.
Easier "stories" on your list to be read, since there is no absolute & specific "plot", but I'm glad I picked this one up. ( )

In the last days of 1812 Theodosia Burr Alston, daughter of former Vice President Aaron Burr and wife of South Carolina Governor Joseph Alston, boarded a schooner bound for New York and was never heard from again.

In the early 1970’s, two elderly women, the last remaining residents of Portsmouth Village, a small town on a barrier island off the coast of North Carolina, reluctantly moved from their island home to the mainland, leaving behind a ghost town.

Michael Parker has taken these two facts, Theodosia’s disappearance and the desertion of a once thriving village, and woven a story so engrossing and believable that it’s hard to image it isn’t true.

When her schooner is attacked by pirates and everyone on board has been killed, Theodosia is spared by a momentary act of feigning insanity. Believing that she has been touched by God, the brutal pirate is too superstitious to take her life and instead deposits her on a barrier island to live out her days as a captive under his cautious protection. Taken in by another exile, Theodosia learns that all of her education is of no use on this island where the way of life is a hardscrabble existence and any hope of her survival depends on the whim of a vicious pirate and her ability to make him believe she is thoroughly mad.

More than a century and a half later and a few islands away, the last two remaining descendants of Theodosia make up two thirds of the population of Yaopon Island, a tiny barrier island battered into obscurity by the years of hurricanes and the changing world around it. The elderly sisters, Maggie and Whaley, are dependent on the only other resident of the island for much of their food and information. Woodrow Thornton, an elderly black man descended from the freed slave who worked for Theodosia is torn between resenting the sisters and caring for them at the same time. The loss of his wife Sarah during a hurricane and whatever hand the sisters might have had in her fate has brought Woodrow to a crossroads in his life.

“The Watery Part of the World” is a beautifully written, richly imagined tale that weaves together the lives and circumstances of inhabitants of the long distant past with the present day lives of their descendants. It is a story of relationships and how our past shapes our present and what happens when you never allow change into your life. Parker’s prose is gorgeous, lush and descriptive and full of evocative turns of phrases. “The Watery Part of the World” is a novel to be enjoyed slowly, savoring the narrative as it spins its tale from the past to the present and back again.