BOOK REVIEW: "the watermark"

The Watermark
By Travis Thrasher
Copyright 2001
Tyndale House Publishers, inc.
Adult Fiction
2 Bookmarks

I finished reading The Watermark over a week ago, but I have been torn about how to write this review. There is a part of me that liked the book. It had a certain sense of “can’t-put-it-down”ness. The characters were interestingly drawn. And the feeling of not being entirely sure what was going on kept me on the edge of my seat for a time.

But once I figured out what the real story was, it sort of felt….well, wrong.

Sheridan Blake (cool character name, by the way) is 28 and returning to college. For several pages of the book, you don’t know why he was absent so long. But the reader eventually learns that Sheridan has done something bad. Very bad. And not only that, but he got away with it.

Sheridan is torn up from his guilt and remorse, or at least he is supposed to be. In reality, it seems he is just trying to forget his past and ignore its importance in his life. Fairly early on in the book (and periodically throughout the remainder), the author points the story in the “if only he could look to god for forgiveness” direction. It seemed to me that these gratuitous pleas for Sheridan’s soul were thrown quite haphazardly into the book. They almost seemed like a weird sidenote.

Toward the end of the book, the plot started to become quite predictable and cliché, which was disappointing. Some of the choices the characters made seemed very out of character. And I really wasn’t sorry when the book ended. And that’s all I have to say about that.