The Sweetness of Water

 I was ready to like [a:Nathan Harris|21291170|Nathan Harris|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1616057232p2/21291170.jpg]'s [b:The Sweetness of Water|54404602|The Sweetness of Water|Nathan Harris|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1593989595l/54404602.SY75.jpg|84896483] well enough but not ready to think much of it as I was certain it would be diminished by my having read [a:Shirley Hazzard|7486|Shirley Hazzard|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1418422924p2/7486.jpg]'s [b:The Great Fire|11737|The Great Fire|Shirley Hazzard|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327998858l/11737.SX50.jpg|2453617] right before it, and that is a stupendous book.
 I was wrong; Sweetness is strong enough that you can read the best book you've ever read, find a pile of money, go into space, and give birth and it will be undiminished by any of those distractions. The first pages prepared me for an interesting story and I got that. What I didn't expect was to find so much magic on the page of a debut novel.
 It was long-listed for the 2021 Booker Prize. The winner that year was [a:Damon Galgut|64459|Damon Galgut|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1246536783p2/64459.jpg]'s [b:The Promise|54633172|The Promise|Damon Galgut|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1619750215l/54633172.SY75.jpg|85240090]. I'd loved The Promise. I'd have chosen Sweetness over it, though that might be my American bias showing.

 His love had never been gracious, and he had no means to recognize what Isabelle might require of him—the necessities of her grief. There were few times as a grown man he could recall being intimidated, but the door to Caleb's room, where she had locked herself up, was so overwhelming that he had to lean against the hallway wall just to settle his bones. He moved forward, reassured by the sliver of lamplight that reached under the doorframe and lazed over his feet—the only signal that she was within.
 "Isabelle." Somehow his voice cracked even on the single word. He stepped back and put his hands on his hips, then stepped forward to try again. "Isabelle," he said. "I've made a stew."

You know how some books can feel like a carefully placed set of dominoes that fall in a pretty satisfying manner once the inciting incident pushes the first one over, while others feel like insanely complicated Rube Goldberg machines where you don't know what the hell is going on but you wanna stick around to the end anyway? By contrast, this one felt like a finely-engineered wristwatch with dozens of interacting gears all dancing around each other at the same time and left me thinking, "how the hell did they do that?"

It's been a hot minute since I've read a book with this many characters that get their own POV chapters (5 people in this case), but it felt like more because there were just so many motives and goals and interests and shifting alliances and secrets going on. And yet nothing ever asked you to suspend your disbelief or seemed too far of a stretch; the motives and justifications were pretty airtight and could be traced back to an origin pretty clearly.

I'm talking about this too abstractly. Basically, right at the end of the American Civil War, a father learns that his son died a coward's death while trying to surrender to the Union during a battle, and he doesn't know how to tell his wife. While walking around the woods that he owns in Georgia, he finds two brothers, recently freed slaves, squatting on his land and trying to figure out their next steps. Union soldiers roll into town to keep the peace and Emancipation has rattled the old white upper class, leading to a lot of tension that eventually explodes in a climax.

This... is a strong case for Goodreads to have half-star increments for ratings. I really enjoyed this story and how the main characters were all demonstrably different from who they were at the beginning of the book, but the climax happened and then there were seven more chapters of denouement after that, which was entirely too long for my tastes. If you don't mind a slower-paced story that takes its time wrapping up, maybe you'd get even more enjoyment out of this than I did, but this is a quintessential four-and-a-half for me.