Summary and Reviews of By Way of Water by Charlotte Gullick

Book Summary

A heartfelt novel about the legacies of love, faith and violence, and the private rules we set for ourselves when the world seems irreconcilably misaligned.

Struggling to feed their children in an unforgiving California forest when all the logging jobs are gone, Jake and Dale Colby make personal vows that can only make matters worse. Jake will not accept help--from the government or his neighbors--and Dale won't allow him to hunt. She believes her faith will sustain them. He believes in nothing.

But one other member of the family makes a promise to herself. Seven-year-old Justy believes that she alone can hold the family together, even when Jake's violence surfaces again.

Narrated by this gentle, even wise young girl, this moving story reveals a family's most volatile emotions and private aspirations, like old-growth trees through an inland fog. With a clear insight and the deepest empathy, young Justy isolates the stark realities around her, even as she dreams with her mother of a safe world that only God can promise.

By the final pages of Charlotte Gullick's powerful debut novel, we discover--along with Justy--how to heal the lesions that appear when obligation is delivered against human nature.