On an island in the Great Massasauga Swamp—an area known as "The Waters" to the residents of nearby Whiteheart, Michigan—herbalist and eccentric Hermine "Herself" Zook has healed the local women of their ailments for generations. As stubborn as her tonics are powerful, Herself inspires reverence and fear in the people of Whiteheart, and even in her own three estranged daughters. The youngest—the beautiful, inscrutable, and lazy Rose Thorn—has left her own daughter, eleven-year-old Dorothy "Donkey" Zook, to grow up wild. Donkey spends her days searching for truths in the lush landscape and in her math books, waiting for her wayward mother and longing for a father, unaware that family secrets, passionate love, and violent men will flood through the swamp and upend her idyllic childhood. Rage simmers below the surface of this divided community, and those on both sides of the divide have closed their doors against the enemy. The only bridge across the waters is Rose Thorn.
Sounds grim, but there’s an indomitable spirit pushing back against despair in Campbell’s work ... A light touch of fantasy runs through this story ... She immediately peoples her pages with a large cast of eccentric characters and a thick backstory so casually laced with shocking violence that it’s tempting to think you must have misheard. But don’t be quick to drive by Whiteheart. You must succumb to the pace of The Waters ... It subtracts nothing from Campbell’s originality to suggest that she’s taken up the mantle of John Irving ... Astonishing.
What I always enjoy in Campbell’s work is her precise way of guiding a reader who may know nothing about southern Michigan across the natural landscape so that it becomes visible and easy to imagine. She also doesn’t hesitate to develop the individualities of each (usually female) character ... A thought-provoking and readable exploration of eccentricity and of all different kinds of love — familial love, romantic love, love of knowledge, love of animals and love of one’s own environment, even when it is a difficult place to live.
Seems painstakingly crafted for satire ... Yet ultimately, Campbell’s first novel in more than a decade has nothing profound or progressive to say about its fertile fictional world, instead serving up a conclusion driven by wish fulfillment, specious sentimentality, and misguided moralizing ... Gender roles in Whiteheart are robustly hackneyed ... Floats lots of big ideas, but none are plumbed deeply ... This book will likely find its intended audience, but I’ll stay out of these waters.
