A grim picture of a community drowning in large and small disasters of its own making ... Things We Found When the Water Went Down is an ethereal, mixed media mystery novel about what we lose when the strongest, most vulnerable among us are made to disappear.
In her debut novel, Tegan Nia Swanson asks a lot of her readers. The initial pages of the book offer a list of characters and a map, and footnotes accompany the reader throughout, but it is nevertheless easy to become disoriented in this layered, complex story that fuses the fantastic with the heartbreakingly mundane. Narrators vary. Timelines splinter and loop. Fractured events filter through shifting lenses. And yet, Swanson creates a powerful, polyphonic story of survival and healing that gives in return as much as it asks ... The documents Lena collects reveal not just events surrounding Marietta, but also the stifling atmosphere of Beau Caelais, a small town so viscerally rendered that it is just barely fictional ... Lena’s journey is labyrinthine, but its twists and turns clarify rather than complicate. This is true of the book’s murder mystery—its motives and logistics slowly surface as Lena’s investigation continues—but far more compelling is how Swanson’s recursive revelations blend stinging realism with a profound metaphorical exploration of trauma ... Swanson’s unflinching, finely detailed attention to wounds and to damage—both environmental and personal—is unsettling and often uncomfortable ... By allowing Lena’s meticulous pursuit of the truth to transcend the physical and mental barriers imposed on her, Swanson creates beautiful possibilities of real healing unconstrained by the premise of 'reality.' As Lena also discovers, it takes work to get there: a suspension of expectations and of disbelief, an acceptance of uncertainty, an openness to following an unconventional path through pain. But these are certainly worth the revelations they give rise to.
Elements of mystery, supernatural, and dystopian fiction vie for attention in Swanson’s intriguing and inventive debut ... While the mash of genres doesn’t always make for suspenseful reading, Swanson’s novel explores themes of violence against women, small town prejudice, and corporate disregard in fascinating and unexpected ways that fans of stylish, experimental fiction will appreciate.
Brash, atmospheric debut ... Though Swanson’s novel includes news stories, police interviews, and other elements of a detective story, it resists easy categorization. Swanson shifts from footnoted just-the-facts police interviews to lyrical prose poems to visual collages; the cast of characters is similarly diverse ... Swanson’s approach is impressionistic and heavy on allegory ... Swanson handles this in a witty, sober manner, so the effect is less New Age–y and more earthy and strange, like a Joseph Cornell shadow box. An inventive and beguiling debut.
Impressive experimental debut ... The circuitous narrative branches out to include details about Marietta and Lena’s lives, the area’s dark lore, and a bevy of clues ... By the second half, the parts crystallize into a legacy of sexual abuse and a chronicle of revenge. The result is a darkly provocative assemblage ripe with quirky characters and undertones of horror, with allegorical notes grounded in the landscape upon which the citizens live and thrive. This gloomy and atmospheric mystery works on multiple levels.
