The Waters

Hermine “Herself” Zook is a healer who rules over an island in a swampy area of Michigan known as “The Waters.” People, including her three grown daughters, fear her, but her powerful herbal and plant-based medicines have cured the townspeople for decades of viruses, pains, and unwanted pregnancies. Her first two daughters Molly and Prim were foundlings, but Rose Thorn is the product of Hermine’s husband having an affair with Prim before getting kicked off the island. Herself, now nearly eighty, is raising eleven-year-old granddaughter Dorothy “Donkey” Zook. Donkey loves animals and longs for her mother, Rose Thorn, to marry Titus, whom she wants as her father. Donkey is the product of Rose Thorn being raped by Titus’s drunk father in this richly nuanced tale of rural poverty, changing landscapes, corporate control of farmland, religious extremism, childhood naivete, and the shaky balance between nature and humanity.

Bonnie Jo Campbell’s novel The Waters (Norton, 2024) was a Today Show “Read with Jenna” Book Club selection. Her other novels include Once Upon A River, a National Bestseller that was adapted into an award winning film, and Q Road. Campbell’s short story collections include American Salvage, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, and Women and Other Animals, an AWP Grace Paley Prize winner. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, and a recipient of the Eudora Welty Prize and Mark Twain Award. She lives in Kalamazoo with her husband and donkeys.