Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC!

This was my third French-Canadian read in as many weeks, and definitely the most successful! I admittedly struggled for the first third or so, and given that it’s only 180 pages, this isn’t an insignificant chunk. But once I got adjusted to the characters, I was swept up in the beautiful melancholy of this narrative. It moves between three generations of women, as the youngest learns about her mother and grandmother’s lives, both of whom lost lovers to the water. When I got to the end, I almost wanted to skip right back to the beginning and start again, armed as I was with the context.

My main peeve was that it flits around too quickly. Some of the chapters are a mere page, and then we’re thrown back 70 years - if the storytelling wasn’t so poetic, I’d have whiplash. As it stands, it is a gorgeous little novel that just requires some patience.