The Shimmer On The Water by Marina McCarron

 

The Shimmer on the Water by Marina McCarron.

Published in ebook 4th August 2022, and in paperback 10th November 2022, by Aria, Head of Zeus.

From the cover of the book:

When you're lost sometimes the only way to look forward is to look back...

Three women. Two generations apart. One secret they share.

Maine, 1997. As the people of Fort Meadow Beach celebrate the Fourth of July, four-year-old Daisy Wright disappears and is never seen again.

Maine, Present Day. Fired from her job and heart-broken, Peyton Winchester moves back home for the summer. Bored and aimless, she finds a renewed sense of purpose when an ad for a journalism course reminds her of a path not taken. Returning to life in her hometown brings back all kinds of memories – including Daisy's vanishing when she was a young girl herself.

As Peyton begins her search for the truth, new discoveries begin to intertwine Daisy's past and her present with irreversible consequences.

***********

Maine, 2021. Peyton Winchester, at a low ebb after being fired and having the stuffing kicked out of her by a disastrous romance, returns to her small Maine hometown of Fort Meadow Beach for the summer. Back under her parents' roof, in her stifling childhood bedroom, she is bored and frustrated with the direction her life has taken. The cool relationship she has with her mother is not helping, and her lack of purpose only seems to be making things more awkward between them. 

Reflecting on her past dream to become a journalist, Peyton starts to ponder on the unsolved case of six-year-old Daisy Wright, who went missing from the town's beach on 4th July 1997. She cannot shift the feeling that she might know something that would help to solve the mystery, even though she too was only a small child at the time. As spending time in town brings the memories flooding back, she begins to put together the pieces of what happened that day, and her conviction that she holds the key to solving the case becomes overwhelming.

Tennessee, 1965. Eualla Tompkins is growing up in poverty with a down-trodden mother, a drunk for a father, a violent older brother, and a frail younger sister called Minnie. She is starting to realise that their poverty marks them as different to many of the other people in town. When Eualla and Minnie return home from school one day to find that their mother has abandoned them, Eualla and Minnie's lives take a turn for the worse. Euallla knows that their only chance for survival is for her to work as hard as she can to get them out of this place once and for all.

The story flows back and forth between the thread of Peyton's search for the truth about Daisy's disappearance in the present, and Eualla's coming of age tale from 1965 onwards, with flashbacks to the time around Daisy's disappearance in 1997. It takes some time to understand quite how Peyton and Eualla's sides of the story relate to each other, which adds a delicious layer of extra mystery on top of the slow-burn build-up into what happened to Daisy, but after a while you see where McCarron is going with this. The threads gradually weave together and cleverly collide in a way that allows you to not only fill in all the gaps about the difficult family relationships that flood this novel, but also serves to ramp up the tension around Peyton's search for the truth.

There is so much here about dysfunctional relationships that perpetuate through time, of the push and pull of love, and yearning to cast off the things that we feel hold us back, and McCarron uses these themes to beautifully examine how we cannot move forward until we acknowledge how the past has shaped us. There are very painful depictions of mother-daughter and sibling relationships that rip your heart out, but as the story progresses you learn that it is not always quite that easy to paint anyone in shades of black and white even if you do not agree with their actions. These characters are complex, and as McCarron slowly peels back the layers, the chance for reconciliation does present itself as she reveals the truth we have been grasping for on more than one level.

The story caught me from the very first page, and I loved how McCarron manages to create a really compelling, genre-busting novel that combines a cracking mystery about the unsolved case of a child's disappearance, with a delicious exploration of complicated family dynamics. I was so impressed by her ability to combine the poignancy of an incisive dissection of what motivates people to do the things they do, with a riveting story full of suspense. This is not an easy task, and yet McCarron achieves it seamlessly, keeping you firmly on the edge of your seat in all areas of the story. She also uses water, and the tug of hidden depths nicely throughout.

This book really took me by surprise in the way it blends so many themes and intriguing elements together in one perfect package. I read the whole brilliant novel in one fell swoop, unable to look away for a minute. Marina McCarron is a class act, and I cannot wait to read more from her. 

The Shimmer on the Water is available to buy now in ebook, and will be published in paperback in November 2022.

Buy links:      Amazon     Waterstones

Thank you to Aria, Head of Zeus for sending me an e-copy of this book in return for and honest review, and for inviting me to be part of this blog tour.

About the author:

Marina McCarron was born in eastern Canada and studied in Ottawa and Vancouver before moving to England. She holds a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Publishing degree. She has worked as a reporter, a freelance writer, a columnist and a manuscript evaluator. She loves reading and travelling and has been to six of the seven continents. She gets her ideas for stories from strolling through new places and daydreaming. Her debut novel, The Time Between Us, came to her as she stood at Pointe du Hoc on a windy June day and asked the magical question, what if...?