Category: Reviews by Patricia Prijatel

The Covenant of Water is a voluminous, voluptuous multigenerational family epic teeming with characters connected by water, genes, and community. It is set in Kerala, a lush region on India’s southwest coast of the Arabian Sea, land that becomes a character of its own.

At 736 pages, it is a commitment. The audiobook clocks in at 32 hours. Author Abraham Verghese’s family is from Kerala, but he was born in Ethiopia, of missionary parents. The story was inspired by his grandmother from Kerala.

The novel starts with Big Ammachi as a 12-year-old bride. She immediately becomes mother to Jojo, barely nine years younger. Her gentle, loving husband is never given a name in the book, but is called Big Appachen, or father. Their daughter, Baby Mol, stays a mental age of five but has the emotional range of a savant. Their son, Philopose, arrives with great promise but needs a village to help him find his way. He marries Elsie, a gifted artist, who gives birth to Baby Ninan and almost dies in childbirth with Miriamma.

Big Appachen’s family suffers from what they call The Condition, an ailment that leads to death by drowning at least once a generation, even in shallow water. The problem is exacerbated by Kerala’s geography—it’s laced with canals that largely provide transportation, especially in the early-to-mid 1900s, when most of the novel is set. Big Appachen has The Condition and therefore avoids water, even if it means walking for hours instead of taking a short boat ride. Philipose has it too, but he responds by insisting he can learn to swim. He’s stubborn, but he still can’t swim.

Big Ammachi, a devout St. Thomas Catholic, prays for a savior to find a cure for The Condition. Will it be the gentle Rune, a doctor from Sweden, who builds St. Bridget’s Leprosarium? Or Digby, who comes to India from Glasgow, with his surgeon’s skills and tendency to love women married to other men? Or will the answer come from closer to home? Verghese takes his time to give us the answer, luring us into multiple side journeys that educate and entertain, introducing a slew of characters so well developed we miss them when we finally finish the novel.

The book develops like water itself, building momentum through the years, as traditional medicine merges with Western and as both integrate with the community. Finding a treatment for The Condition means listening to the people, learning their history, using traditional techniques to understand the patient and the tools of modern medicine to define the disease and search for a cure.  

It’s the kind of medicine Verghese teaches as a professor at Stanford Unversity, the kind that works with and for people.

Death is a profound part of the book, and Verghese uses it to show the necessity of truly living with and through family—biological or not. Trauma forges the people of the ovel; in loss they find love; in despair, they turn to goodness.

Verghese says the meaning of “covenant” in the title should remain a bit mysterious and, as in the rest of a novel, “the reader provides their imagination and somewhere in the middle spaces a mental movie takes shape.”

As the book unfolds, the covenant of water becomes a baptism, a rebirth, and an absolution. To coexist with the water, the Kerala community must respect its rhythms and barriers. They know water can heal, it can serve, it can kill, and it can keep secrets.

Verghese does a masterful job reading the audiobook, especially nailing the book’s many accents—Swedish, Scots, British, and varied Indians castes. He has special fun with one particular scene, in which a missionary from Body of Christ (Corpus Christi), Texas, a stand-in for Billy Graham, gives a bizarre sermon that is translated into a form nothing like the original by Uplift Master. (Uplift is one of the many characters named for his function in the community—he takes care of things and boosts morale.) The scene deserves to be listened to, read, and reread.

The book ends in the 1970s, a time of social progress and change. Women doctors are common, valued friends are no longer required to eat outside because of their caste, and medicine is at a crossroads. A new hospital is being built because the community—especially Uplift Master—envisioned, financed, and staffed it. Old ways of healing remain and, ideally, guide a new generation of doctors.

— Pat Prijatel

Note: This version of Pat’s review of The Covenant of Water was adapted from her original review published at Psychology Today: Storytelling as Medicine

Katie Wyler began her trek through the Appalachian Mountains in 1779, escaping from the Shawnee warriors who had abducted her and killed most of her family. Now, nearly 250 years later, she’s still wandering, showing herself mainly to Nora Bonesteel, the wise woman who lives at the top of the mountain and has second sight. Katie‘s trek creates the backdrop of this book, which is about journeys of love, life, nature, justice, and retribution.

Hiram Sorley, given the unfortunate nickname Harm, has just escaped from prison, where he was serving a life sentence for a murder he does not remember. He has Karsakov syndrome, a memory disorder that is caused by alcohol poisoning, no doubt from the moonshine he consumed in his mountain home. Harm has no fear of being caught because doesn’t realize he’s an escapee. He thinks he has been out hunting or logging, and is eagerly returning home to his beloved wife, Rita, and their daughter Charlotte. 

One thing Harm is sure is that the Lord will take care of him, and the Lord oddly does provide Dinty Moore stew, a can opener, peanut butter, and even a backpack to carry it all in. In less biblical reality, these are all courtesy of Jeremy Cobb, who is also walking the hills tracing Katie steps as part of his doctoral work. He’s a better philosopher than hiker and is not so good at paying attention to regional experts, so he heads out with a pack far heavier than he can carry. To lighten his load, bit by bit he throws things along the path. Harm, following behind him, picks them up.

Jeremy doth provideth.

Author Sharyn McCrumb weaves together multiple stories of love—real, flawed, life-affirming, and dangerous—through the centuries. There’s Katie returning to a disastrous reunion with her fiancé Rab. Harm reuniting heroically and tragically with Rita and Charlotte. Deputies Martha and Joe, struggling with Martha’s new job and Joe’s PTSD from the Vietnam war. Sad Chrystal$ is looking for a warm body. Poor Sabrina, ensnarled in a miserable relationship and looking for a way out, responds to violence with violence.

Rita is living life enclosed in plastic with her second husband, the perfectly named Euell. Charlotte, now in graduate school, is becoming an expert on the geology of the Appalachians, which impresses her mother not at all, but gives McCrumb a vehicle for showing the richness of the land, even though Charlotte naively ignores its significance to the humans living on it.  

Toward the end, Nora puts much of this into perspective, telling Jeremy that Sabrina is a modern embodiment of Katie. Despite centuries of folklore, Katie is not the beautiful, clear-skinned woman we might envision, but was poor, underfed, with stringy hair and sallow skin.

As with all of McCrumb novels, the mountains are a significant character. And their degradation, through environmental abuse and development, is a key plot driver. Nothing grows on Harm’s land, 30 years after toxic chemicals were callously dumped onto it.

This is the third of McCrumb’s 13 ballad novels. It was published in 1994, but it has lost little relevance.  BBB has read two others in the series: The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, and The Songcatcher.

— Pat Prijatel

At first, The Thursday Murder Club seems like a light read—charming and witty, with a murder or two thrown in for flavor. But below the fun façade lies a poignant and thought-provoking story about aging, love, loss, and hope.

The plot revolves around four “pensioners”—the book is set in Kent, England— who live in a countryside retirement home. They meet every Thursday to discuss cold cases and, as the plot progresses, they solve a few recent murders that stymie the local police. Elizabeth, a retired spy, is a catalyst for chaos who has a few tricks, plus a gun, up her classy sleeves. Joyce, a retired nurse, sees the humanity that Elizabeth can sometimes miss. She’s the book’s diarist, an outsider who couldn’t afford to live in Coopers Chase if her wealthy daughter hadn’t bought the place for her. Ibrahim still works as a psychologist and is the group’s data collector and analyst. Ron, a former labor organizer, provides a working-class perspective and a certain dim-witted clarity.

When a murder happens close to home, the group grinds into gear to find the murderer and, perhaps, report them to the police. Or not. As Joyce muses at one point:

“After a certain age, you can pretty much do whatever takes your fancy. No one tells you off, except for your doctors and your children.”

At the local police station, Donna longs to get into the detective squad, but doesn’t see it happening until Elizabeth intervenes. Chris, the DCI in charge of the murder investigation, is man enough to see Donna’s strengths, even if his skills as a detective fall far short of those of the murder club. (But whose don’t?) He’s preoccupied with a longing for a fantasy life he fears has escaped him. Good thing he takes to Donna so well, as she’s not only a solid investigator, but an impressive matchmaker.

The backstories and side characters give the book its depth. Steven, Elizabeth’s husband, is in the initial stages of dementia. Joyce is in deep grief over the loss of her husband and keeps looking for a replacement. Bernard, one option, has a grief he cannot live with. Ron’s son might be a murderer or at least a gangster. And Ibrahim fights racism with a sad aplomb.

The characters consume large quantities of wine and cakes as they plot their strategies and ensnare the bad guys. It keeps them young. As Joyce writes in her diary:

“In life you have to learn to count the good days. You have to tuck them in your pocket and carry them around with you.”

Author Richard Osman says he was motivated to write about senior citizens after visiting an upscale retirement home in England and meeting its accomplished residents who no longer went to work every day, but whose brains were still alive and quite well. This is the first book in a series; the fourth and most recent was published in mid-2023.

— Pat Prijatel