Mirkat Always Reading

So, there is a swimming hole know as "the drowning pool."  In the 1600s, teenage girls and women accused of witchcraft were drowned there.  Since then, it's been a place of a string of other mysterious deaths--suicides, murders, undetermined.  The most recent woman to be found dead in the pool is Nel Abbott, who had been working on a manuscript about the women and girls who had died in it over the years, and this on the tail of 15-year-old Katie Whittaker's suicide.  These deaths are one-two punch for Lena Abbott, Nel's daughter and Katie's best friend.  And suddenly Jules, Nel's estranged sister and Katie's last remaining family member, arrives to look after the niece she has never known.

This book ended up leaving me kind of cold.  It is told from the multiple perspectives of a large cast, some narrated in first person, while others are in a more detached third.  The "Jules" sections are often dominated by Jules addressing as "you" her dead sister.  Not my favorite device.  Also interspersed are several excerpts from Nel's manuscript, The Drowning Pool. Although I mostly listened to the audio version, I quickly picked up the hardcover, when I realized that early on I was fairly lost as to who the characters were.  Reading the early chapters in print helped pull everything into place, but even once I was used to the cast, I sometimes found myself needing to think a moment to remember who some of the characters were and how they were connected to other characters.

I did find myself interested in following through to the resolution, but I didn't find the resolution satisfying.