The Drowning Kind by Jennifer McMahon | Expected publication: April 6th 2021 | 336 pages | Goodreads
REVIEW
This is a suspenseful, haunting, and captivating story. Jax learns that her sister, Lexie, has drowned in the natural spring located in her late grandmother’s house. Lexie moved to this house after inheriting it, and has worked on researching its history ever since.
Once Jax arrives at the house to coordinate her sister’s funeral and put her affairs in order, she discovers Lexie’s research and becomes absorbed by what she finds.
There is a dual timeline; the other story starts in 1929 and is narrated by Ethel Monroe, a new bride who wishes to get pregnant and starts visiting the natural springs to help her conceive.
I enjoyed the story; it kept me in suspense from the beginning and was scary at times. The author did a great job with the imagery and the setting. I highly recommend it.
PUBLISHER’S DESCRIPTION
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Invited and The Winter People comes a chilling new novel about a woman who returns to the old family home after her sister mysteriously drowns in its swimming pool…but she’s not the pool’s only victim.
Be careful what you wish for.
When social worker Jax receives nine missed calls from her older sister, Lexie, she assumes that it’s just another one of her sister’s episodes. Manic and increasingly out of touch with reality, Lexie has pushed Jax away for over a year. But the next day, Lexie is dead: drowned in the pool at their grandmother’s estate. When Jax arrives at the house to go through her sister’s things, she learns that Lexie was researching the history of their family and the property. And as she dives deeper into the research herself, she discovers that the land holds a far darker past than she could have ever imagined.
In 1929, thirty-seven-year-old newlywed Ethel Monroe hopes desperately for a baby. In an effort to distract her, her husband whisks her away on a trip to Vermont, where a natural spring is showcased by the newest and most modern hotel in the Northeast. Once there, Ethel learns that the water is rumored to grant wishes, never suspecting that the spring takes in equal measure to what it gives.
A haunting, twisty, and compulsively readable thrill ride from the author who Chris Bohjalian has dubbed the “literary descendant of Shirley Jackson,” The Drowning Kind is a modern-day ghost story that illuminates how the past, though sometimes forgotten, is never really far behind us.
BOOK SOURCE AND FORMAT
ARC, ebook via Netgalley