Review: The Water Diviner by Andrew Anastasios & Meaghan Wilson-Anastasios

Last week I finished reading ‘The Water Diviner’. It was written by Andrew Anastasios and Meaghan Wilson-Anastasios. Andrew was a co-writer on the script for the film starring Russell Crowe, which I unfortunately missed at the cinema and will now have to wait until its DVD release before I can watch and review it.

The book follows the story of Joshua Conner, an Australian man whose sons went missing after the landing at Gallipoli in World War I. After the death of his wife, Conner ventures over to Turkey in search of his sons so they might be buried next to their mother. Along the way he discovers that his eldest son may have survived and the recovery mission becomes a rescue mission. He befriends a young Turkish boy, who he feels a kinship with. He also forms a bond with a Turkish soldier who fought at Gallipoli against his sons and the other Australians.

THE GOOD:

This is a very compelling story. While I was reading the book, I was constantly intrigued. I wanted to delve deeper and deeper with Conner as he travelled through his story. The story is very well researched. The attention to detail in the flashbacks of the battle scenes is amazing. They didn’t shy away from the gory and terrifying parts of the war. From what I understand, the authors took inspiration from actual accounts from the war.

Another part of the story I loved is the fact that there were no ‘bad guys’ or ‘good guys’ in the story. It would have been very easy for the authors to paint the Turkish soldiers in a bad light, but that didn’t happen at all. In fact, the Turkish characters are the heart of the story. Without them Conner’s story would have been very different and possibly terrible to read. It displays excellently how war is not about ‘good guys’ versus ‘bad guys’. War is terrible on all sides and each side is fighting for something they are will to kill and die for. This book understands and shows that.

THE BAD:

I’m going to be real. It’s not that well-written. Now, it’s no Fifty Shades of Grey. That is the worst written book I have ever read (I mean, didn’t she have a thesaurus? Why was the chick ‘flushed’ all the time?). The thing with this book is that I was very aware that these people seemed very inexperienced in novel writing. If the story was so compelling I probably wouldn’t have made it past the first few chapters. The chapters before he gets to Turkey were so hard to get through. They seemed all over the place and like the authors were trying to cram way too much information into them.

The only other problem I had was that on top of not being well written, it wasn’t edited all that well either. I found multiple mistakes, including spelling mistakes. At one point I found the word ‘they’ where the word ‘the’ should have been. To be honest, I was a bit embarrassed for them. I would feel bad if I had worked so hard on a book only to have it published with such silly little mistakes that shouldn’t have been missed.

THE OVERALL: 

I really liked this book. Once I got past the first chapters I was engrossed in the story. I would definitely recommend this to anyone who is interested in war history and wants a realistic fictional story. I will issue this warning though: the scenes in which battle conditions are talked about are fairly graphic. The authors obviously wanted to be as realistic as fiction would allow them, and some of the scenes can be confronting. If this isn’t the kind of thing you would be okay reading, I would stay away. It’s a shame it wasn’t better written and edited. It could have been a truly spectacular read if it was.