The Waters Between

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Synopsis

The time is ten thousand years ago and the place is the shores of Lake Champlain, a land inhabited by Abenaki communities who hunt, gather, and follow the cycles of their unspoiled natural world in relative harmony. Joseph Bruchac uses this setting not just to spin a compelling adventure yarn but also to re-create the cultural, social, and spiritual systems of these pre-contact Native Americans. In this third novel of his trilogy about the "people of the dawnland," the lake they call Petonbowk - "the waters between" Vermont's Green Mountains and New York's Adirondacks - holds both sustenance and danger, and Young Hunter is called upon to confront a dual menace. A "deepseer" or shaman, he must use his full powers first to comprehend the threats and then to defeat them. The lake, it seems, holds a huge water-snake monster that makes it impossible to reap the waters' bountiful harvest of fish and game. And, worse, a tortured outcast, Watches Darkness, has turned against his tribe and is using his deepseer's knowledge to perpetrate horrible acts of senseless evil: he destroys whole villages out of sheer malevolence; he literally eats his victims' hearts to absorb their powers; he kills his own grandmother without remorse.

Is The Waters Between appropriate for my child?

Suitable for most readers 16 and up.

This adult fantasy contains graphic violence including cannibalism (the villain eats victims' hearts), mass murder of villages, and a malevolent antagonist who kills his own grandmother. The violence serves the story but is explicit and disturbing.

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