Ampersand Book Club discussion

Here's our discussion post for Memory of Water. :)

I guess I'm first up :D!

Memory of Water is a book that has a good message overall, but I thought its delivery of that message was really rocky. I enjoyed the author’s style at first because it seemed almost poetic, and to be fair, there are some beautifully written passages. It got really repetitive though, and I got tired of paragraphs of flowery abstract prose that did nothing and bogged the pacing down considerably. I only skimmed a lot of the pages near the end, and I felt like I could get away with it a little too because I didn’t particularly feel attached to the main character. She was supposed to be 17 years old, but she felt a lot younger at times, and she didn’t have much of a personality. That she tries to have some agency over her life near the end of the story was some good character-development, but Noria really doesn’t drive this story- the overarching ecological and political themes do, and she was just a vehicle for them. Maybe someone else here liked that better, but I’m all about character-driven stories, so I ended up bored.

What I did like about this story was the world it was set in. It’s post-apocalyptic but fraught with problems and dangers that are familiar- scarcity, water and the politics/business surrounding it, military control- and it’s not the sort of scenario that seems 100% out of the question for our own future. Having said that though, the overall tone of the story was really preachy, particularly near the start of the story when Noria is thinking specially of people living in our time now and how we ruined the world for them. It’s a good message, but it’s delivered so heavy-handedly. I'm glad this book was on the shorter side, because if it was longer I'm not sure I would have finished it.

I'm glad I wasn't first to post this time because Angela brought up some things that make me reexamine my reaction to this book. I stayed up late to finish it, and though it wasn't a long book, it didn't feel like a quick read. Part of it was that I dreaded the ending. The back cover blurb includes the statement that "with her life at stake, Noria must make an excruciating, dangerous choice." After the book's relatively idyllic beginning, I feared the emotional toll of everything going wrong. At the same time, I worried that the choice she'd have to make would feel cliche. (I can't think of a specific book with a similar plot, but it's a familiar movie trope—a person's loved one is taken hostage, and he or she must make a certain choice or the loved one will die.)

I was also skeptical going into this book because I thought it might prove to be another young adult speculative fiction that's got more marketing than talent behind it. Overall, though, I really liked it. The language is sparse and straightforward, like a tea ceremony. There's this haunting quality to Noria's world that the reader only glimpses, protected as she is by the spring.

(view spoiler)[I'm so glad this book did not awkwardly insert a love interest. I got the sense that Noria and Sanja were just best friends, that there's no sexual interest between them. It's nice to read a book where the friendship between two women is such a big part of the story. Noria doesn't interact much with her parents in the book, but that made sense to me as she was preparing to enter adulthood. It also makes it more believable when her father passes, how she's able to manage on her own. (hide spoiler)]

I can see though how the story might come across as a little bare. (view spoiler)[There's a lot left unexplained. For example, did Noria's father really earn that much as a tea master? How were people able to survive on so little rationed water? What did people eat in everyday life? Also, the name New Qian makes me think that the Chinese are the dominant power in this book. I thought the tea ceremony was a Japanese tradition, however.

I usually don't let such lack of explanations bother me if I enjoyed the book otherwise. I do wish the author had revealed more about the Lost Lands and whatever the researcher had said at the end of the voice recordings.

As for the ending, it's fitting that Noria merely suffers the same fate as others found guilty of water crimes. I thought there might be some final showdown between her and Taro that she'd miraculously win or that someone would swoop in to rescue her. But good does not always triumph, and the torch has passed on to Sanja. (hide spoiler)] I really look forward to finding out what happens next.

(view spoiler)[Ooh, thank you for mentioning the lack of romance! That was a breath of fresh air for a YA novel. A romantic subplot wasn't needed for this kind of story, and I agree that the focus on a female friendship was nice (though I admit I was getting some romantic vibes from Noria and Sanja's relationship, but it's hard to tell if that was an intentional insinuation or not; it could easily be read as just a friendship). (hide spoiler)]

I also wondered about some of the specifics when it came to how people get by in the book's world. (view spoiler)[Noria lived so differently from the rest of her village that we missed out on some details like what people ate and how they handled everyday tasks. It would have been interesting to spend some time in Sanja's POV to see how the average person lived. (hide spoiler)]

I don't have much to add from what Angela and M have already written, but I also really enjoyed this book. I loved the writing style, although I could see how it could be really repetitive after while. The one thing I could not stop thinking about through the whole book though was - if there is such a water scarcity, and all these rules about water usage are in place, why have tea ceremonies at all!?!? It seems like something that "frivolous" would be the first thing to go in a new world with such scarce water supplies. I normally don't care for post-apocalyptic anything, but something about the landscape of this novel was different, and it didn't bother me so much. I loved all the references to the "past-world" and "The Twilight Century", and I was amused at the instances when Noria and Sanja are trying to figure out what items were used for in the past (loved that they referred to tapes as the TDKs). I also agree that for a book that was not that long, it did seem to take forever to get through.

Taryn, I too loved the terminology of "past-world" and "The Twilight Century." I assume readers will find out more about what happened in the sequels. As for the tea ceremonies, that's why I wondered how Noria's parents were able to support the family. I assumed only the very wealthy could afford to participate in a tea ceremony and hence that a tea master could make a lot of money catering to such clients. But I don't recall any explicit statement on that or characters exchanging currency. (view spoiler)[Even after Noria's father died, there's only a brief mention of how a lot of his clients would not give her their business. But who were these people?? (hide spoiler)] I think the story could have benefited from even a short description of how their economy worked, given how little water there seemed to be.