The Water Seeker

by Kimberly Willis Holt

Student Book Review submitted by Daniel:

This is an early 1800's realistic fiction book but a little bit of a fantasy twist as well--a sixth sense.  The story starts out with a man, Jake, who digs wells for a living. He then digs a well for a farmer who did not have any money, so instead he got land to settle down in. A while later he gets married to a woman named Delilah.  Jake and Delilah then live a normal routine where Jake goes west to work and Delilah stays home. But one year Delilah becomes . By the end of May, Delilah is at her mother's house and having the baby. By the time the baby comes out, Delilah is dead!

Well, in the beginning I thought...
it was just going to be another novel about a family surviving in the 1800's, like the other fifty that i had read. Well, that was pretty much the case. But, just because it was an unoriginal story, doesn't mean it was a bad book. This whole story was about Delilah's kid and his aventures with his father to the West. Thats pretty much what most of the books set in the 1800s are about--farming and going west. This was what I expected from this book and it is what I got. But after i read the back of the book, I thought this whole sixth sense thing would change this book for the better.  But, I was dissiponted in how little it impacted the story.

But the author did know what he was doing. I loved the characters and there development throughout the story. I also loved the detail and how it did not feel like you were reading, you felt like you were living it.  If someone had brought up this book to me before I read it saying there was too much detail, I would probably think that was not true. Who's heard of too much detail? But I am sorry to say that the saying, "Too much of anything can only hurt you," really comes into account here. It's probably a mixture of the fact that the author takes two pages to describe a minute's time (which I would be fine with in probably every good fantasy or fiction book), but also that all of this has been heard before. I decided I was fed up of any book that even said the words Oregon and trail in the same sentence.  I did not need a 200 page minute by minute of it. There are too many novels about the 1800's and farming in the 1800's that even the perfect book, written about the 1800's, would get boring.

In the end, this is a good book. The characters were loveable and developed like a normal person would. Also the detail of the environment and characters' body movements made the world seem real.  But the plot is very close to the same of other books and the detail made the book a little bit of a drag. When you add those two together, you get a book that, even though it has wonderful characters and has loads of detail, it seems like a drag to read.  I think that the book could have been better if he strayed away from the realistic aspect and played with the sixth sense, therefore making the story a little more original and making it so that it is not a bother to read at some parts.