Sweet Water

In her powerfully engrossing new novel, Kathryn Kramer (called by the New York Times “a storyteller to whom we willingly submit”) explores the American way of love via two romantic triangles. One is taking place now (a skeptical horsewoman, a passionate biographer, an international financier) and the other a hundred years ago, at the same Vermont resort hotel.
As the plot unfolds, the secrets embedded in the two romances work their way to the surface: newly discovered love letters, addressed in the last century to an earlier proprietress of the hotel, a Miss Lucinda Dearborn, not only turn out to be from America’s greatest expatriate novelist but also point to Lucinda’s unsuspected lifelong affair with another man.
In the present, mysterious events that occurred the winter the current owners of the hotel, Ned and Greta Dene, met as teenagers, threaten to overwhelm their lives once again when Greta’s first and greatest love disappears in a plane crash and the priest who brought about their meeting reappears, as if on cue.
As the story progresses, the distance between what happened in the past and what is happening now begins to close, and Lucinda Dearborn’s amazing and ultimately tragic story illuminates Greta and Ned’s summer of crisis.
Sweet Water is a spacious novel, rich in event and the feel of America–Civil War boys returning from the fighting, the hotel’s famous water cures, a woman galloping her horse across the hills, a Catholic priest who presides over a miracle he doesn’t believe in, an old-fashioned diviner who goes looking for water and turns up the letters that set everything in motion.
It is also a literary detective story, a brilliant and gripping novel about the ways in which love can be fueled or destroyed by secrets, about the distances between men and women, and about the extraordinary and unexpected ways in which faith between them is engendered.