Elizabeth Black’s debut release, The Drowning House, is an intricately plotted and intriguing story set in Galveston. This beautifully written story explores the mystery surrounding Stella Carraday’s purported death during the hurricane that devastated Galveston in 1900 and a long held family secret that irrevocably links the Porterfield and Carraday families. To read my review in its entirety, please click HERE. ( )

In Elizabeth Black's debut novel, The Drowning House, photographer Clare Porterfield's life is in turmoil. Her six-year-old daughter has died. She is immersed in inescapable grief and her marriage is drowning under the weight of her sorrows. She accepts an invitation to return to her hometown of Galveston, Texas, in order to select the material for a photography exhibition funded by the wealthy Will Carraday.

Clare has been gone from the island for many years and, along with others, is questioning her real reasons for returning. In fact, Clare has had a long time relationship with the Carraday family. She had left the island after a tragedy involving her and her friend, Patrick Carraday. He was sent away and they were kept apart.

Galveston has a past seeped in tragedy and that feeling imbibes the novel. Part of the novel explores the mystery surrounding Stella Carraday’s drowning during the hurricane that devastated Galveston on September 8-9, 1900.

Clare may be in Galveston to look at photographs, but what she really seeks are answers to decades old questions, some of which she didn't even know she needed to ask. She has some questions about her past and her family that need to be answered. As she tries to come to terms with her new life, memories start to come to light in a new way.

While the writing in The Drowning House is superb, I'm going to admit that I knew, without a lot of effort, the big secret(s) the novel was going to reveal very early on. If Black had allowed that the reader would have that foreknowledge, leaving us to feel oh-so-slightly-smug at our deductive prowess, and then did a little flip with the plot, I would be applauding her for the extremely well-written novel with the clever plot twist.

Black has written a sensitive, atmospheric, southern gothic mystery. While readers might know as quickly as I did the secrets that are going to be revealed, Black has done an amazing job developing her characters, as well as life in Galveston in this finely crafted novel.

Highly Recommended


Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Knopf Doubleday and Netgalley for review purposes.
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Clare Porterfield has made a successful life for herself. As a photographer, she is invited back to her hometown of Galveston, Texas for an exhibition. Reeling from a family tragedy and unraveling marriage, she takes refuge in the offer to reconnect with the comfort of familiarity there.

In revisiting the past, Clare is able to reexamine her own past, as well as research her family history. She is seeking answers involving her family’s connection to a longtime influential family, the Carradays.

Clare is intrigued by the unusual drowning of Stella Carraday, who drowned in the family home during the Great Hurricane of 1900. She had drowned hanging by her hair from the chandelier. The unusual circumstances have long been a mystery. Now Clare’s curiosity grows, drawing her into a dark and unsettling past.

This dark mystery tells some of the history of Galveston, while telling the stories of two families. A fascinating and well developed suspense novel, it is one not to be missed. ( )

At times hazy, at times sharply in focus, this novel's blurry/clear path mirrors the main character's own discovery of things that have been hidden from her.

Clare is a photographer whose young daughter died in an accident. She feels estranged from her husband, who grieves differently (more quickly?) than she does, and when she receives a job offer from her hometown - the island of Galveston, TX - she goes. Clare hasn't been back to the island since she was sent away at age 14, after a tragic fire in which a girl died. Ever since, she has missed her neighbor, Patrick Carraday, but he seems to be avoiding her.

Once home, Clare focuses only partly on the job; she also begins to unravel secrets from the past. Some are hidden in her own memory, some are hidden in plain sight, and some are hidden in the binding of a journal. There is incest, abuse, and infidelity, and Clare crosses back and forth between distance and discovery.

The writing is poetic but not flowery. The roles of the characters, if not the characters themselves, are familiar: the black maid, the eccentric old woman, the graceful mother, the charming patriarch, the handsome outsider, the elusive old love. I'm not sure how long the story will stay with me, but I very much enjoyed reading it.

Quotes:

There is so little to rest the eye on. Is the emptiness too much to bear? So that without understanding why, Islanders will do anything to fill it? I don't know how it happens. But islands have a way of taking over, of seizing the imagination. So that the people who live on them become different too, become wishful thinkers, fabulists, rearrangers of facts. What those on the mainland would probably call liars. It's not surprising really in a place where survival, life itself, is the result of a kind of stubborn reinvention. (67)

You are waiting for the world to end, and part of you wants to see it happen. (67)

And for a time, I still believed what Islanders do - that if you look hard enough into the distance, you can see the thing you want most coming toward you. (77)

"If you're going to take the blame for what happens in your life, you must learn to take the credit too. All success entails some element of chance." (Harriet to Clare, 135)

We imagine people in the past as different from ourselves. We see their clothing - all those layers - and confuse it with the bodies underneath....We picture them as simpler beings.
But people don't change in any essential way....Underneath, things are not so different. (150)

I think now that desire runs like a thread through the fabric of our experience, holding our lives together. And when that thread unravels, everything gathered around it comes apart. (189)

It should be easy to tell this story. I know what happened, and when. I should be able to put the events in order, line them up like beads on a string. But I think now that time is not a line but a spiral, bending back on itself, delivering us again and again and again to the same places. (249) ( )

This review was originally posted at The Bawdy Book Blog

/ˌmēdēˈōkər/
Adjective

Of only moderate quality; not very good: “a mediocre actor”.

Which perfectly describes The Drowning House by Elizabeth Black. After suffering a personal tragedy, Clare Porterfield decides to meander across the country back to Galveston Island, Texas, in her decrepit station wagon, leaving her husband behind in Washington, D.C. She’s been offered the opportunity to direct a photography exhibit about the Island, and uses the chance to try to reconnect with an old “friend,“ as well as research local lore about Stella Carraday, the girl who drowned during the great hurricane of 1900.

I did like The Drowning House, please don’t mistake my rating for not liking it. It was a captivating interesting novel, with an interesting setting and interesting characters. While reading, I did feel like I could step into the pages and feel the hot blast of heat off the sandy beaches, or reach down from the rails of a fishing boat and stroke the top of a stingray. Black’s writing is gorgeous.

But the writing, while fluid and beautiful, is too meandering for me to hold my attention. I believe it took me three weeks to finish The Drowning House and that isn’t a good thing. A good book needs to grip me, it needs to rip me from my seat by my collar and command me to pay attention and dance. The Drowning House is kind of like the meek guy at the really fun party; you see him out of the corner of your eye and if you pay attention, you know he’s pretty cute, but he’s not interesting enough to go talk to.

I did not feel like I got the point of the book, either. Was it about finding out what happened to Stella, or was it about finding Patrick, her long-lost best friend, or was it about reconciling with herself her rotten childhood (and why it was so rotten)? Maybe it was all these things, but I never did feel like the focus was on one of them enough to truly make me pay attention to the story. At best, I wasn’t bored, I just wasn’t interested.

What’s truly maddening is the outcome of the book: I was not in any way satisfied, and left with more questions than I had going in. Like how do you not get incarcerated for shooting someone? Dude. The ending made me feel like there was no real ending, or objective for Clare, just that I was along for the ride of her story for a little while. A little frustrating.

The characters themselves are interesting and pretty profound. All of them have many different sides, as well as stories, to have kept me interested enough to continue reading. If it wasn’t for the characters, I would have quit reading it very early on.

This is a book for the dedicated and die-hard Southern Gothic/Mystery fans. Otherwise you may want to check out other reviews before you consider purchasing.

**The publisher provided this copy in exchange for my unbiased review. ( )