Troubled Waters - Mary Annaïse Heglar - ★★★.¼

AUTHOR: Mary Annaïse Heglar

GENRE: Climate Change Fiction

PUBLICATION DATE: May 7, 2024

RATING: 3.25 stars.

In a Nutshell: A dramatic OwnVoices novel dealing with some powerful contemporary and historical themes. Has its heart in the right place, but mere intent isn’t enough. Wish it had been stronger in the core plot, more focussed in its themes, and more structured in its approach. It could have been brilliant, but ended up just decent.

Plot Preview:

2013. Twenty-year-old Corinne has been passionate about the environment ever since she heard, in her childhood, about the Great Flood of 1927. But her fervour has increased after her brother died aboard an oil boat a year ago. Now Corinne is determined to do all she can to save the future from those intent on destroying the planet. However, in the course of her activism and a radical act she is planning, she ends up uncovering some skeletons that her grandmother Cora had buried deep inside her heart, from the time of the Civil Rights movement.

The story comes to us in multiple timelines from the third person limited perspectives of Corinne, Cora, and Cora’s son Harold.

Bookish Yays:

💐 As I am passionate about the topic of climate change, I was excited to grab an environment-themed novel. The author’s research on this topic is extensive. (I never knew of global warming leading to mutated fish! 😕) The facts herein are relevant, and scary to the point of being nightmare-inducing. The intent is praiseworthy.

💐 Cora and Harold are interesting characters, and add a lot of realism and rationality to the proceedings with their perspectives.

💐 Cora’s traumatic memories, mostly but not only from the historical timeline, create a far greater impact. I don’t want to reveal what her backstory contains, but I’d rather have read more about her experiences than Corinne’s. The historical timeline captures the feel and the facts of the era well.

💐 Love the duality of the title, indicating the stormy relationship among the family members as well as the troubled waters of the Mississippi and the floods that are a constant part of it at present.

💐 The book captures the essence of the location well. The food, the beliefs, the music, nature and the issues all get fair representation. It’s interesting to read a story from the Southern Black perspective.

💐 This quote: “Climate change is just as institutional as racism.”

💐 This is an OwnVoices work, not just because of author’s ethnic and geographical background (which matches that of the characters) but also because she is a passionate advocate of the travails of climate change and a winner of an Environmental Journalism award. The authenticity of the rep shows in the content.

Bookish Mixed Bags:

🌹 Corinne is meant to be an impressive character, and she is, to a great extent. But, either because of her age or because of the somewhat flat character development, she reads like a typical YA character, focussing only on the short term and acting more impulsively than intelligently. I can’t root for her actions though her thoughts are praiseworthy.

🌹 With only three dominant characters, the family connection feels too small and slightly incomplete. That said, these three characters have enough of baggage throughout the book. Harold’s character especially, often acting as the mediator between grandmother and granddaughter, has a subtle yet important track.

🌹 The book jumps across various timelines multiple times. It has clear date indicators, so make sure you keep an eye on the date and month and not just the year. I didn’t have a problem with the timelines as they were marked well. However, there are also unmarked flashbacks that appear randomly. A character could be pondering over a current issue and suddenly jump to something in their past and spend a long time there. These unindicated time jumps were annoying after a point because they broke the thread of the contemporary flow. As a result, the structuring feels quite hodgepodge.

🌹 The initial 75% of the book was still okay, but the final quarter drags a lot, going through unexpected directions. Though I am a fan of magical realism, I still don’t understand why and how it suddenly popped up in this part of the book. That scene came out of nowhere!

Bookish Nays:

🌵 As is typical in debut works, we get the infamous “kitchen sink” full of themes here: Climate change, environmental activism, natural disasters past and present, crimes by Big Oil, veganism, racism, Black discrimination, KKK, police atrocities, teen pregnancy, parental abuse, parental death, first menstruation scare, segregation, generational trauma, grief, Hurricane Katrina, the Civil Rights movement, the prejudiced attitudes in the South, … With so many powerful topics, it feels like the book doesn’t explore anything in depth. It just spreads itself too wide and ends up making a dent in none.

🌵 The actual plot is paper-thin. The rest is just padding, which though important, makes the book feel stretched out. The effect is hence rather flat. Even a character-driven work needs a strong plot.

🌵 There's a ‘Cora’ and a ‘Corinne’! 😬 I know families often have people with the same initials, but in fiction, surely we can avoid this kind of nomenclature! It is confusing!

Basically, who wouldn’t want to love such a book? It educates us on such an essential topic that affects all of us. But it is still a fictional novel, and in that role, it isn’t so impressive. The character development and the plot structuring both need finetuning.

I still appreciate the intent of this novel. If the one thing this book can do is to create fear in the reader’s hearts about the climate and take steps to minimise their carbon footprint, I’d still consider it a winner. Climate care is not just the government’s onus, and this novel highlights some ways through which citizens can also step up to the task. (I’m not referring to Corinne’s choice of activism here; that is not my cup of tea.)

Recommended with reservation to those interested in an OwnVoices climate change fiction.

My thanks to Harper Muse and NetGalley for the DRC of “Troubled Waters”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.