The Hundred Waters
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3.0 • 5 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Celebrated by the Boston Globe as “a brilliant anthropologist of the suburbs,” the deliciously weird and darkly offbeat Lauren Acampora returns to the secret lives of the polished Connecticut haven that got us all hooked on NPR Best Book of the Year The Wonder Garden, and jolts us with the sparks that fly when those lives collide
“Acampora’s prose has a seductive, pearlescent allure.”—TIME Magazine
Formerly a model and photographer trying to make it in New York, Louisa Rader is back in her affluent hometown of Nearwater, Connecticut, where she’s married to a successful older architect, raising a preteen daughter, and trying to vitalize the provincial local art center. As the years pass, she’s grown restless in her safe and comfortable routine, haunted by the flash of the life she used to live. When intense and intriguing young artist-environmentalist Gabriel arrives in town with his aristocratic family, his impact on the Raders has hothouse effects. As Gabriel pushes to realize his artistic vision for the world, he pulls both Louisa and her daughter Sylvie under his spell, with consequences that disrupt the Raders’ world forever.
A strange, sexy, and sinister novel of art and obsession, in The Hundred Waters Acampora gives us an incisive, page-turning story of ambition, despair, desire, and the pursuit of fulfillment and freedom at all costs.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the arresting latest from Acampora (The Paper Wasp), a former artist is jolted from her suburban torpor. Louisa has left Manhattan and her photography career behind to settle in the wealthy town of Nearwater, Conn., with her older architect husband, Richard, and their 12-year-old daughter, Sylvie. Shaken by the death of a former lover from her Manhattan art world days, Louisa begins to mistrust the "fairytale quicksand" of her Connecticut life ("Grown people need friction to live," as the author puts it). Enter the Steigers, an Austrian couple who are big players on the international art scene, and whose artist son, Gabriel, makes brash environmentalist installations (he calls one of them a "new ark for our time"). Gabriel soon talks Louisa into an under-the-table residency at the town art center, which she's trying to whip into shape, and enlists Sylvie's help in a secret and dangerous project. The entanglements result in a series of literal and figurative conflagrations. Louisa makes for an alluring heroine who is more complex than the average bored, tempted suburbanite. The supporting characters, however, are less well drawn, whether it be the priggish Richard or the committed but comically pompous Gabriel. Still, Acampora achieves a sharp and tense depiction of an illusory and stultifying haven. Overall, it's enjoyably offbeat.
Customer Reviews
Confused
Boring