Reviews

• Storytelling at its best!

  Carol Goodman creates characters you care about and draws you into each world in her novels. This is my favorite book of all her writing. She tells stories within stories within stories. Her heroines are all slightly troubled and then get into trouble. This one felt realistic. Even her surprising twists are spot on. Loved this book!

• Thoroughly Enjoyable

  I was caught up immediately in the Selkie story (growing up in an Irish-American family) which I had heard about as a child. Further adding to my delight is the setting. I grew up in the Hudson Valley, and I am very familiar with New York City and the place in the Catskills where the story is set. I do not want to give away the plot, but I think you will be carried along by this "daughter's life and her interest in understanding more about her deceased mother".

• In a time before rivers were drowned by the sea, in a land between the sun and the moon....

  Carol Goodman is gifted with a smooth, hypnotic story teller's voice and she uses it to advantage in 'The Seduction of Water.' Briefly, it's the story of Iris, unpublished want-to-be author, who ekes out a living teaching English to immigrants, prisoners, and ex-cons. The orphaned daughter of a hotel manager and a fantasy writer, her life is rather bland on the surface, until Iris decides to write an article about her mother and the missing final book in her trilogy. Then Iris's life begins to change in ways that mirror the Irish folk tales that formed the basis of her mother's stories. Goodman's story teller's voice is true; her prose runs smoothly, her plotting is deft, and her characters - even her bit players - are intriguing.

• Slow and plodding

  Unlike the other works of this author that I'd read, I found this really hard going. It took a very long while to stop plodding plotwise and start to grab my interest. If you are someone who has no patience for very slow plots then avoid this book.

• Comfort food

  For some reason Carol Goodman's novels are like comfort food to me. They may not be gourmet meals with the finest ingredients, but they are familiar, enjoyable, and entertaining. Many of her earlier books have similar features (a main female character who is a writer, teacher, or artist, for example). "The Seduction of Water" is her second novel. In this one, Iris, a teacher and kind of a wannabe writer, ends up solving the mystery of her mother's death. There is usually a romantic element to her books, but it is not overwhelming. There is just something relaxing to me in her writing and satisfying enough that I always come back for more.

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