The Water Dancers: A Novel | 
| Author: Terry Gamble
Publisher: William Morrow
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 1561752
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.4 x 1
ISBN: 0060542667
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780060542665
ASIN: 0060542667
Publication Date: June 1, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
A stunning new voice in literary fiction makes her remarkable debut in a moving, lush, and brilliantly rendered tale of the walls between wealth and poverty, love and duty, and a rich evocation of the years following America's greatest trial and triumph. Terry Gamble's The Water Dancers is the story of Rachel Winnapee, a poverty-stricken, sixteen-year-old Native American orphan who goes to work at the opulent March family summer home on the shores of Lake Michigan in the post-World War II summer of 1945. A young woman with no delusions about her place in this world of privilege, she quickly adapts to her role as an obedient servant expected to remain silent and unobtrusive while catering to her employers' wishes. Surrounded by a wealth she never imagined, she strives to remain invisible, until she is assigned the task of caring for the family's tragically scarred, emotionally shattered young scion, Woody March. A veteran who lost a leg in the Pacific conflict, Woody is haunted by his injuries and battlefield experiences -- and by the loss of the older brother he emulated -- and now desires only relief from his twin agonies of pain and memory. He recognizes a kindred spirit in this gentle and mysterious child-woman who is so unlike anyone he has ever known yet who understands the depths of human suffering. In Rachel's eyes, Woody is a noble, tortured prince, and her fervent wish to help ease his torment soon metamorphoses into more intense and irrevocable feelings of love and need. But if Rachel is a young woman with no future, Woody's has already been mapped out in intricate detail: as the last surviving March son, he is to run a successful banking business, marry the well-bred Elizabeth, and raise a family who will carry on the March name with distinction. Yet the obligations he never questioned prior to the war are becoming increasingly odious to him -- especially now, as he feels himself becoming irresistibly drawn to Rachel in ways no one else in his world would understand or tolerate. As the relationship between two lost and damaged souls intensifies, they move toward the one pivotal event that will alter their lives in ways both heartbreaking and profound. An unsparing portrayal of the conflicts of race, culture, and class that lays bare the complex passions and deepest yearnings of the human heart, Terry Gamble's The Water Dancers possesses a lyrical, strong, and assured artistry and heralds the arrival of a major new American novelist.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 Don't Borrow to Read This Book November 26, 2004
2 out of 6 found this review helpful
For a book that claims to be lyical and class concious, it fails miserably. All class sterotypes from the knocked-up Indian girl, who works as a maid to the rich on Beck's Point (Harbor Point, Michigan) to putting down the Jews at nearby Charlevoix, as being noveux and crass, this book contains all of the attitudes of a spoiled child of Midwestern industialists. Even the wealthy materfamilias happens to be "Catholic" and dies in a fire. A Repubican WASP point of view is contained throughout this novel. Now that this hardcover book is remaindered, the 44 cents price seems fair.
 Review - The Water Dancers October 5, 2004
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Our local library reading club is here in the San Francisco Bay area, where the author of "The Water Dancers," Ms Terry Gamble, resides. We were able to enlist her the other evening to join our review session covering her novel. It's too bad that most readers will never enjoy the good fortune of a somewhat informal chat with an author while discussing one of her recent works and how she goes about her craft. It provides a very different perspective.
I first read "The Water Dancers" six months ago and recommended it to our reading club. In preparation for Ms Gamble's attendance, I gave the novel a second reading last week, which for me is always the ultimate test of a novel's real worth. During a second read do the characters still seem interesting and fresh? Does a rereading of the dialog provide new character insights? Are there elements of prose and style and structure that went unnoticed during the initial read because attentions were so fixed on plot points? And for this reader, "The Water Dancers" holds up as an exceptional novel, even with a second reading.
Potential readers out there can gather the main plot points from any number of other reviews, so I won't bother to repeat them here. I only gave "The Water Dancers" four stars, but I'm a hard grader. Most of the novels I pick up and read these days rate two or perhaps three stars, and often that's because I'm feeling compassionate. One of the principle strengths of this novel is the way the Indian characters are drawn. I read a lot of novels covering the Native American cultures, and I've grown more than tired of the patronizing way Indian characters always seem to be presented with extra sensory mystical insights into the religious beyond, and the supernatural powers to spot the Great White Buffalo stampeding across the distant plain. Terry Gamble's characters of Rachel Winnapee, Ben Winnapee and Honda Jackson act, talk and feel to the reader like real people experiencing and reacting to the real world. Two of the novel's most powerful scenes occur in the beginning and ending, when Rachel's grandmother and Lydia March appear to Rachel as ghost-like apparitions rising into the sky as they die in the flames of their burning houses. And yet these scenes did not feel to a reader like something from The X-Files.
On the other hand, the white characters (with the exception of Ada and Bliss and Hank) seem so uniform in their physical, intellectual and emotional weaknesses that, for me, it becomes the principle shortcoming of the novel. At times the novel seems to incorporate the cliche that white people descended from wealth are evil by definition. By the end of the novel Ms Gamble is able to imbue some of these characters with more depth and understanding, but I wish she would have done it from the beginning. And then again, maybe that's just me.
I loved that the sparse physical descriptions of the characters worked so well as a contrast to the detailed descriptions of all the surrounding physical geography. Ms Gamble's repeated descriptions of Rachel's hair as wild and "unbraided" was one of the subtle guides to our understanding of Rachel.
But the real reason to pick up and read "The Water Dancers" is the prose. The writing within the novel is exceptional. Sentence structures are direct, rhythmic, paced, and always graceful. Those adjectives don't seem to fit together, but Terry Gamble's prose makes it all work. The novel was such an easy read that at the end you will need to stop and draw a breath to remind yourself just how good it was.
Ms Gamble has another novel due out next year. So pick up "The Water Dancers" now, enjoy the read, and wait with baited breath like the rest of us for her upcoming novel.
A luminous debut that overflows with beauty. April 14, 2004
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Like author Terry Gamble (of Proctor and Gamble lineage), I've spent nearly every summer of my life in and around Harbor Springs, Michigan, a small Northern Michigan resort community on the Little Traverse Bay. Gamble has drawn from her childhood memories spent on Harbor Point to create the lush settings for Water Dancers, using thinly veiled pseudonyms for Harbor Point (Beck's Point), Harbor Springs (Moss Village), Petoskey (Chibawasee), and Cross Village (Horseshoe Lake). The novel's protagonist, Rachael Winnapee, is a sixteen-year old Odawa orphan from Horseshoe Lake who, since the death of her grandmother, has lived at the Indian School in Moss Village (the actual school is alongside the Holy Childhood of Jesus Catholic Church in Harbor Springs), and like many First Nations orphans, is sent to be a domestic at Beck's Point. The novel begins in 1945. Rachael ends up serving the March family from St. Louis. The March's sons are both overseas fighting, Lip in Belgium and Woody in the Pacific Theater. When Lip is killed in battle and Woody comes home an amputee and morphine addict, it is up to Rachel to help make Woody whole. The two begin a brief, intense love affair, sealed with seashells, hidden gifts, lovemaking in dunes, shallows and empty rooms, and finally, Rachael's unwanted pregnancy. Rachel raises her son Ben on her own, continuing to live with the midwives who delivered her child. After nine years of helping out on their farm, Rachel moves back to Horseshoe Lake with Ben. The novel fast forwards to Ben's experiences fighting in Vietnam and his difficult readjustment to civilian life, and culminates in an unexpected and explosive conclusion in which the past is confronted and old ghosts laid to rest. Water Dancers is a multifaceted novel of healing (three of the main characters are veterans), of class and race, duty, discovering inner strength, and seeking peace. The characters are poetically and lovingly crafted, down to the most minor details. Terry Gamble's first novel deliciously brings to life the many moods of water and forest that dominate life in Northern Michigan, and for those who are familiar with Northern Michigan, like Rachael's habit of licking stones, this novel will bring you home.
 mesmerized by Water Dancers September 10, 2003
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
I was spellbound by this book- the depth & originality of the characters, the nuance in which their drama unfolds, the richness of the different worlds & settings they inhabit. A great read!!
A reader from Vermont September 8, 2003
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
I loved this book. It is spare and poetic and packs a real punch. I could feel and see and smell the setting (Beck's Point) in Michigan, and felt that the characters were real and compelling. It was hard to let them go. I bought three other copies to give to friends.
This love story is set among the richest AND the poorest in American society--their interactions and assumptions about each other, and Rachel and Woody's attempts to bridge the gap are wonderfully rendered.
I hope Terry Gamble writes another novel soon. I'll be first in line at the bookstore.
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