Coldwater

by Mardi McConnochie

A beautiful and mesmerizing debut, Coldwater is the tale of three sisters, the dangers of isolation, and the explosive repercussions when seemingly absolute power is challenged.

Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Wolf live on Coldwater, a penal colony off the coast of Australia, where their father, Captain Wolf, rules the household with the same unyielding sternness he imposes on the inmates. The young women rarely venture beyond their corner of the island and meet no one but the prison guards. Their imaginations, however, know no boundaries, and together the three conjure up complex and magical lands. They vow to become novelists, dreaming of literary fame and of lives far from the harsh desolation of Coldwater.

As governor of the convict island, Captain Wolf is working on a masterpiece of his own–the perfect prison. His theories of prison management have proven remarkably During his tenure, not one prisoner has escaped. The arrival of an unusual convict from famine-stricken Ireland seems an opportunity to create a model prisoner–until one of his daughters becomes obsessed with the handsome young man and the delicate balance the family has constructed is shaken beyond repair.

This remarkable story grew from the author’s lifelong curiosity about the Brontë sisters and their classic novels. Taking the few seeds that history reveals about Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Brontë, McConnochie has skillfully reimagined their lives and created a work of fiction as imbued with passion as their novels and as psychologically riveting as any contemporary thriller.

Mardi McConnochie’s first novel, told through the eyes of the Wolf sisters, is an unforgettable portrait of the love and fear, the trust and betrayal, and the potential for freedom in one extraordinary family.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Australia, Adult, Book Club, Historical, Literary Fiction

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[reading is my hustle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the idea of this book! Mardi McConnochie deserves much praise for turning her curiosity about the elusive Bronte sisters into a work of fiction. She plunks the literary trio onto the island of Coldwater, a penal colony off the coast of Australia. The sisters live there with Captain Wolf, their unyielding father. Theirs is a life of isolation, with time spent on household chores, cooking, and sewing. Their fates are soon changed as each of the sisters grow weary of their stagnant existence. The dynamics between the sisters are important, and their quarreling and shifting alliances allow you insight into their different personalities and temperaments.

The first half of the book is the most interesting and the elegant writing style is impressive. It is fun to realize that Charlotte and Emily mirror the characters of Jane Eyre and Catherine Earnshaw (both in acts and narrative style). That said, the second half of the book is a bit hokey and takes a melodramatic turn (lots of wind-swept hair, gasping, stormy weather, darkness, and screaming). It is supposed to be tragic but ends up reading as overwrought and a little bit silly. Still, this is a wonderful story that will leave you wanting for more details of the Bronte's lives.

[Lily Mulholland · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another book I really wanted to like, but came away from disenchanted. It's a gothic tale of three young girls trapped on an island that's literally a prison - a convict prison in early white settlement Australia. Told in the vein of the Bronte sisters (of whom the author is apparently a great fan), the novel read unfortunately almost as fan fiction. The names of the key protagonists are all from history, there are nods to Jane Eyre and Pride & Prejudice, as well as the hystrionics of Wuthering Heights. I could possibly have gotten over all of that as it's quite a good story, but the chopping and changing between four points of view was an unnecessary and confusing complication. I don't understand why the author chose to do that other than to show she had mastered her story and this wasn't fan fiction.

Don't get me wrong, there are passages of beautiful writing and the story does attempt to address the horror of being trapped by the circumstances of your life, but it did not draw me in as it should have, as its artifice was all too apparent.

[Andrea · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was confused by this book... At first I thought it was supposed to be about the Bronte sisters, because that's what it alluded to in the description. While curious that I'd never known they were Australian, I thought perhaps Mardi was just using their real lives and making up a story to go with what was known about them. However, aside from the first names of the family it seems to have nothing to do with them. The timeline of their lives and deaths didn't even match up. I don't understand why the author wouldn't just have changed the characters' names.

Another irksome part of this novel is how I couldn't tell from the voice of the story when or where it was set. It sounded like it was set on some random island during an indeterminable year, only without any electricity. If I had just picked this novel up without seeing the cover, I never would've guessed it was set in 1800s Australia.

Overall, I just wasn't into the false reinterpretation of history, the characters, the voice, or the overall plot.

[Stef Rozitis · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't really understand the point of this book. I tried to get past the fact it was set in a convict colony which freaks me out ever since i read the term of his natural life when I was 13 and also all the history I read as a teen with details about convicts. Really awful.

But that's Ok, that's just history whether we like it or not but then what were the Bronte sisters doing there, and why did they seem so much younger than their ages and worst of all Emily as a prcocious brat that talks (thinks?) in capitalised emphasis. Emily the brilliant reduced to this naive idiot and her horrible romance.

I had some issues with the father being labelled "mad" which seems ahistorical to me (violent excesses of a powerful man over subalterns and women are usually not seen as insanity) also because what an awful way to portray mental illness and what an odd and dysfunctional juxtaposition with the first Mrs Rochester. The shifting points of view with Anne in third person seemed clumsy too.

All in all I wonder if I missed something that I should have got out of this book?

Ah well.

[Caitlin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book - because the idea is so fascinating (what if instead of existing in isolation in England, the Bronte sisters lived in isolation in colonial Australia? Discuss.)

In fact, my suspicion is that this might have been a higher degree by research thesis (where a student will write a creative piece and then apply theory to create an exigetical dissertation by way of explanation.)

So, I read fiction to get away from academia (as I usually read in bed when I've been marking student papers and need to nod off) - so I kept finding my academic cap making its way back on my head as I was reading this (then I'd swear at it and it would slink off again.) Unfortunately, this is the sign of something which hasn't suspended my disbelief enough.

I've read others like this - it ticks the theoretical boxes and it's clever, but not really engaging as a story, and I certainly wasn't enjoying myself in parts. As an academic who also runs a secondhand bookshop, I stand between the "clever literary exercises" versus "what actual, for realsies people want to read" debate, I seriously believe that this needed a different editing to "make do" to fit the market. (I also don't believe they should be mutually exclusive, but I'll save that for another time.)

This is a brave and intelligent book - however not one to really snuggle back in a chair with - you do need to work at it, and you might want the company of a book club to discuss it with.

[Ironical Dins · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I ultimately enjoyed this book, I found it to be kind of an odd duck. The author (and this not a spoiler by any means) used the Bronte sisters as her main characters, but places them in an Australian penal colony. The historical circumstances of the penal colony are factual, from her note at the end. But I don't really understand what the aim was in using the Brontes' on this island? To attract a certain readership, perhaps? Maybe an intellectual/academic exercise in examining the colonial life? Or what it meant to be a lady in those particular circumstances? Whatever the case, it's an entertaining read and I recommend it to people who enjoy the Brontes, a gothic mystery, and Victorian historical fiction.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started this book in the middle and read it right to the end. And then, I read from the beginning until the middle so I wouldn't miss anything. This means that I liked the book. There was a lot of material that seemed quite contemporary or that might be relevant to readers even though the story was set in the mid-nineteenth century. As for the plot, you can find it around. this was my first exposure to Mardi McConachie and I was impressed.

[Michelle Patrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is hard to get started and finished roughly. I found myself about halfway through just reading it to finish it. Almost put it down and moved on to better things. It seems it should have been about the Brontë sisters, but the historical notes in the back don’t line up with the story in the book.

[Carolyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reminds me of Jane Eyre in setting and characters.

[Eva · Rating 3 out of 5]

Syskonen Brontë omplanterade i Australien?
I alla fall har den familjen inspirerat denna författare, men visst känns det lite udda med familjen från heden i ett varmt sandigt landskap.

[Kelby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting and different. Not my favorite book ever, but definitely kept my attention and left me wanting more

[Laura Wirpsza · Rating 3 out of 5]

The beginning of the book is a bit confusion and then halfway it picks up steam with a delightful twisted ending.

[Samuel Zackrisson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Melodrama. I enjoyed the historical setting though, and the mixed narrative style of intermingled diary entries and exerpts from the father's reports.

[Les · Rating 3 out of 5]

My Original Thoughts (2001):

I'm savoring this one! Lots of passages I want to mark. Alternating POVs. Definitely a book I'd like to own to read again...Well, that's how I felt at the beginning of the book, but it fizzled out at the halfway mark. Flat characters. No connection to anyone. Easy to put down.

My Current Thoughts:

It's too bad this wasn't a more even story, since I enjoyed the first chapters so well.

[Marissa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel with a premise quite like that of Coldwater, a book that takes real-life historical figures and reimagines them in a different setting. (I know there’s such a thing as “alternate-universe fan fiction,” which is basically what this is, but I’ve never seen that done in a serious literary novel.) The intriguing idea behind Mardi McConnochie’s book is: what if Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, daughters of a Yorkshire clergyman in the mid-1800s, were instead Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Wolf, daughters of the governor of a penal colony on a remote Australian island in the mid-1800s?

McConnochie’s Wolf sisters are even more isolated and alone than the Brontë sisters, who at least got to study in Brussels. Their widowed father derives his sense of self-worth from the strict control he keeps over his family and the prisoners in his charge. But when Emily (of course) falls in love with a sexy Irish prisoner (of course), the girls begin to taste freedom and the father starts to lose control.

Coldwater is told from the perspectives of all three sisters and their father, alternately. Charlotte serves as the main narrator: she is practical and straightforward, but has a tendency to believe she’s the only person on the island with any common sense. (In her self-righteousness, she is more like her father than she realizes.) Emily’s sections are written in breathless prose that sometimes recalls Emily Dickinson more than Emily Brontë: “Yet it is impossible that we could have known each other—except in a Dream—Yet his Visage is imprinted on my Soul—” Anne’s story is told in third-person, perhaps because she is the least famous of the three Brontë sisters and therefore feels the most “distant.” At first Anne just seems like a confidante for Emily, but in the second half of Coldwater she comes into her own, to satisfying effect.

It’s impossible to read Coldwater without comparing it to the Brontës' novels, which doesn’t always work to its advantage; it is shorter and less richly textured than Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights. Maybe that’s understandable, because the Brontës wrote about things that were rooted in their own experiences of nineteenth-century Northern England, while McConnochie is writing about a time and place not her own. She's able to imagine and describe her characters’ emotional states quite well, but is less convincing when describing events. The climax of Coldwater is very busy (there’s a prison riot and a few competing escape attempts) but I didn’t quite buy it; it didn’t feel vivid enough.

I often find it hard to enjoy movie adaptations of my favorite novels (even if they're well-done), because I am constantly evaluating the filmmakers’ choices in comparison to the novel and thus cannot fully sink into the story. That’s kind of how I feel about Coldwater: I enjoyed parts of it as a guilty pleasure, and parts of it because I found it interesting to contemplate the choices that McConnochie made when reimagining the Brontës, but it never escapes from the shadows of the stories that inspired it.

[JG (Introverted Reader) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Author Mardi McConnochie imagines what the lives of the Brontë sisters would have been like if they had grown up on a remote island/penal colony off the coast of Australia. In this fictional tale, their father is the warden of the colony, paranoid to the point of madness and with a giant God-complex. He makes life hard for everyone on the island, including his daughters. Charlotte is the sensible one, Emily is overly sensitive with a large streak of the fey in her, and Anne is caught somewhere between them.

The girls realize after their father is shot (it happens on the first page) that they need to try to take control of their own lives, and so they set about trying to earn money the only way they can--by writing. They know it's not a very practical plan when they live in Australia and all the publishers are in England, half a world a way, but what other hope do they have? Their father won't be around forever.

I really don't know why this is rated so poorly because I thoroughly enjoyed it. Maybe people are upset that the lives of these classic authors are so very fictionalized? I haven't read reviews yet to see what's going on.

I love Jane Eyre and I tend to love Gothic stories. Seeing Charlotte Brontë in her own Gothic story was a treat for me. Emily irritated the heck out of me, but Wuthering Heights irritated the heck out of me too, so I thought she was well-represented. I haven't read any of Anne's work although I intend to. The island is so gloomy and atmospheric that it becomes a character in its own right.

I felt so very bad for these sisters. Growing up alone like they have, they aren't really fit for anything. They don't have any "society" to go out into. The only people they see besides their own family are the officers of the prison. They aren't really stimulating companions. They've had such sad, hard lives too. Even before they came to the island, there was tragedy in the family that left them all reeling. None of them have really recovered. As more of their past is revealed, I was more and more horrified of what had happened and how they had each reacted.

If you don't mind reading about real people in a completely fictional setting, I recommend this for a good, Gothic read. This is the perfect time of year to pick up a book like this. Cold howling wind outside, cold howling wind between the pages, but you're nice and cozy with a blanket and a cup of tea. Sounds like heaven to me.

[Judy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mardi McConnochie has had a life-long fascination with the lives of the Bronte sisters and their repressed lives with their father on the Yorkshire moors. Using their story as a starting point, Coldwater is the story of three sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, and the dangers of isolating and dominating adult children. The novel is set in a penal colony off the coast of Australia where the sister's father, Captain Edward Wolf, is the Governor of the prison and attempts to run his household with the same iron fish with which he runs Coldwater. Living such isolated lives with their father, the sisters meet very few people and never leave the island. So they are forced to use their imaginations to reinvent their reality. In doing so, they vow to become published authors so that they can earn enough money to be able to escape the island and escape the domination of their father and begin new lives. I wanted to like this novel much more than I actually did. It's an indication of my lack of interest in the story that I had to renew the book twice at the library before actually finishing it.

[Lynda · Rating 5 out of 5]

A suspenseful, beautifully written novel for young adults/adults, where the lives of the Bronte sisters are transposed into a parallel historical world - of 19th century convict Australia. Here, Charlotte, Anne and Emily are the daughters of Captain Wolf, a man of steel resolve yet great love for his family. The 3 sisters are held in thrall by their military father, who from 1839 is the governor of a brutal, island penal colony off the NSW coast, where only the most hardened colonial convicts are sent. Although Emily, Anne and Charlotte are shielded from most of the cruelty and brutality, they cannot fail to be aware of it, and object to it. Their loving father is in sharp contrast to the cruel, obsessed man he becomes when overseeing the island with meticulous zeal. It is only towards the end, when the girls begin to see overpowering glimpses of the real world, that they realize their constrained lives lived mainly in the mind are too feeble, and they too must break free.

[Yvonne O'Connor · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author takes her own interest in the lives of the Bronte sisters and creates a new fictionalized account of their lives. This account has the girls living with their father (a warden instead of a priest) on an island off the coast of Australia. She touches on their budding literary interests and throws-in bits of historical fact to keep the reader tied to the story.

On its own, the story is quite intriguing. The catch becomes this: I wouldn't have bought the book without the sell re: the Brontes, but reading it knowing so much about them already, I was disappointed that the ending didn't "match" with real life. Also, I was completely disinterested in the father sub-plot which was only distracting and under-developed.

[Stuart · Rating 2 out of 5]

This quirky bit of Bronte fan fiction starts out promising and then quickly dissolves, caving in on itself and turning into a fairly typical and not terribly compelling romance complete with cardboard men and improbable uses of Chekov's gun over and over again. By the end of the book I found myself wishing it would just end already, and that's saying something considering it's not very long. Nothing feels particularly well-rounded or thought out, plot points from the actual Bronte novels don't feel alluded to so much as ripped off, and the historical notes at the end are more interesting than the book itself.

[Jane · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an historical novel about a widower, the Commandant of a remote Australian penal colony, and his three daughters, Emily, Charlotte, and Anne. The three young women are writers, in a tale suggestive somewhat of the Bronte sisters, the famous English authors. Written in the style of a Victorian novel it details the dangers of isolation and the explosive repercussions when the seemingly absolute power of the Commandant is challenged. As with all Victorian novels, there is a fair share of unbridled passion and forbidden love as everything comes to a head. A quick read.

[Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three sisters and their father the Governor of a convict island off the coast of Australia which is part of a penal colony. Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Captain Wolf. Interesting reconstruction of the Bronte family. Wonderfully written and becomes a psychological thriller when Emily falls in love with one of the convicts, Anne falls in love with "the Diver", Charlotte tries to save them all, and the Captain tries to control them all.

[Cyndi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book to be sad and true to the time. Submission, loyalty, suffering all must have been felt by the women of those days. The creative mind so wanting to be allowed the opportunity to be expressed and to feel happy and joyful about that expression. This book told a great tale and I was riveted at the hope that things were going to turn out so good for the three sisters, in spite of the odds. Interesting story with a twist about the Infamous Bronte family.

[Jean]

Loved this book. The idea of your dad being a prison warden and raising three daughters on this island, just is different, and I like different.
I liked the way the book made me wonder about the fathers character. Was he just doing his best or getting very carried away?
I have three daughters and one is named Emily so of course I pictured what these girls were really like.
It held my interest the whole way through!

[Jolynn Powers · Rating 3 out of 5]

interesting setting and time period.. a island prison off the coast of Australia and a family that lives and works their. Found the idea interesting full of interaction between the family and the criminals.. but just to slow and romantic for me.Criminals are painted to be Heroes and a love affair happens.. fell a sleep reading this every time I picked it up

[Johanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Också detta en mycket intressant och bra bok. Språket var väl inte tipp-topp konstant, men en bra handling och fina karaktärsbeskrivningar. Gillar starkt att den är inspirerad av systrarna Charlotte, Emily och Annes liv - inte allra minst för att jag tycker att de är helt fantastiska författare alla tre!

[Jill · Rating 2 out of 5]

This story never quite gets off the ground. It's supposed to be based upon the Bronte sisters, but I never quite got the feeling of a decent plot. It has interesting points, and the setting is unique, but overall, the story wasn't strong.

[Phyllis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A diary of sorts, leaving hints about the famous Bronte sisters as the author spends quite another tale. I especially loved the way Emily wrote--lots of dashes. Emily's description of the dream state (pages 95-97) was one piece of perfect literature--well done.

[Toni · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wanted to like this but I gave it a hundred pages and even though there was promise of something happening, by then I just didn't care. This may say more about my attention span than than the quality of the book but I don't need further education in penal NSW and the rest didn't engage me enough.

[Darla · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting, well written twist on the lives of the Bronte sisters. Be sure to read the author's interview at the end.