Water Damage: A novel of liquid mystery

by Vivian McInerny

American student Liv Edlen lands at the Bath Academy of Arts in England in the 1970s. It's a rare time when creative working class kids mingle with bohemian aristocrats, when art seems revolutionary, and culture clashes prove inevitable. She meets a wealthy, married, man with a penchant for collecting art and people and finds herself entangled in a web of deceit. But who is using whom?

259 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 6, 2016

About the author

Vivian McInerny is a journalist and fiction writer. Her short stories are published in several literary anthologies including 805 Lit + Art , The Dunes Review, and The Cardiff Review. Her ebook novel was a Best of the Writers Project 2016 selection of Multnomah County Library in Portland, Oregon. She's a Fisthtrap fellow and recipient of a Metropolitan Arts Commission grant for fiction.

McInerny is working on a collection of linked short stories, a novel, and a memoir about traveling overland from Europe to India at age eighteen.

More than 55K follow her writing on the site ello (now dead) where she posts drafts and essays.

Reviews

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this Alice in Wonderland, through the rabbit hole adventure/mystery about an 18-year-old's debut onto the British cultural scene of the '70s. Liv Edlen, a survivor of childhood cancer, is a gutsy, observant gamine with enough artistic talent to land her on scholarship to an art academy in Bath, where she is both fascinated and repelled by the advances of a wealthy ne'er-do-well who makes a habit of preying on the vulnerable. McInerny is a good storyteller and captures both the scene and setting of Bath and the world of British rock. Her descriptions have the ring of authenticity. She misses the opportunity, however, of connecting the watery world of Portland to Liv's transport to Bath, another highly saturated setting. I read an early version of the book through Smashwords, before the book's listing with Amazon. Line-editing was incomplete. All in all, though, Liv and Una, her mirror opposite traveling chum, were alive on every page.

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved Liv Edlen's story, even if there were times that I felt I was like Alice dropped off in Wonderland without a map and I found myself rereading parts to see where I was.

A young cancer survivor, Liv finds herself abandoned (in a way) by her family when she's finally recovered, her siblings feeling left out with all the attention given to her during her illness. After being emancipated from her parents, she strikes it out on her own with an unlikely alter ego, Una. All this sets the stage for the life she encounters in Bath when she's set to study art and the people she meets, most of all, Richard Wilcox. At times, I felt she was so clueless, taking everything with a shrug of her shoulders in a way. But then she's 18 in the story which is set in the 70's with punk rock getting to be all the rage, those times we see through Una's wild adventures.

But it's Liv's story through and through and the whole time I was rooting for her to get a grip on what was going on, and stay away from the bad guys, i.e. Wilcox. But of course, she doesn't, and she ends up mired in a mystery that costs her more than she probably bargained for. But like Alice in Wonderland, there is a way out. She just has to find it, and in the process maybe find herself.