Book Summary and Reviews of The Hundred Waters by Lauren Acampora

Book Summary

Celebrated by the Boston Globe as "a brilliant anthropologist of the suburbs," the deliciously weird and darkly offbeat Lauren Acampora returns to the secret lives of the polished Connecticut haven that got us all hooked on NPR Best Book of the Year The Wonder Garden, and jolts us with the sparks that fly when those lives collide.

Formerly a model and photographer trying to make it in New York, Louisa Rader is back in her affluent hometown of Nearwater, Connecticut, where she's married to a successful older architect, raising a preteen daughter, and trying to vitalize the provincial local art center. As the years pass, she's grown restless in her safe and comfortable routine, haunted by the flash of the life she used to live. When intense and intriguing young artist-environmentalist Gabriel arrives in town with his aristocratic family, his impact on the Raders has hothouse effects. As Gabriel pushes to realize his artistic vision for the world, he pulls both Louisa and her daughter Sylvie under his spell, with consequences that disrupt the Raders' world forever.

A strange, sexy, and sinister novel of art and obsession, in The Hundred Waters Acampora gives us an incisive, page-turning story of ambition, despair, desire, and the pursuit of fulfillment and freedom at all costs.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

1. The Hundred Waters takes place in the idyllic but sleepy fictional town of Nearwater, Connecticut. Louisa is occasionally frustrated by the "fairy-tale quicksand" of life there; Richard seems to experience Nearwater as an oasis (p. 68). Talk about the town and the prominent role it plays in this narrative. What does Nearwater mean to Louisa? To Richard?
2. Both thirty-nine-year-old Louisa and twelve-year-old Sylvie are drawn to eighteen-year-old Gabriel. Richard and Louisa are a married couple nearly two decades apart in age. How do you think age gaps impact the way the characters relate to each other? Do their attitudes reflect universal generational patterns or divides? Do they subvert them? In what ways?
3. What is the role ...