What the Water Gave Us

This novel, set in post-Acadian Louisiana swamps, reimagines the history of the Great Expulsion through a fantastical lens, as the women in a small village soon come into strange powers. In the isolated, religious community, women’s intuition and agency must grapple with men’s violence and power. All the women in Marie’s small bayou village can see into the future. Everyone but her. Marie can only see into the past. Her ability transforms from embarrassing to terrifying when Marie witnesses the murder of four girls, including her grandmother Aveline, sixty years earlier. Carried out by the town elders, the deaths were soon covered up and rescripted. In the present, Marie’s friend Danielle has gone missing. With few people to turn to, Marie must reckon with her town’s murderous past and unravel Danielle’s disappearance. Some of the men who killed the girls years ago still live and go unpunished. The more Marie sees of the past, the more her own family is implicated. She must ask herself what justice looks like when the killers are close to home