Title: Trouble Waters
Author: Mary Annaïse Heglar
Rating: 5 Stars
Reviewed by: Shakera
Genre: Women’s Fiction
Publisher: Harper Muse
Date of Release: May 7, 2024
Pages: 334
Format: Hardcover (Hear Our Voices)
Trauma is, in general, a difficult thing to talk about with anyone, let alone someone you love and care about. This is something Corrine and Cora are learning in this… gut-wrenching, heartbreaking, and inspiring story told by two generations of women.
The story is told from three perspectives: Grandma Cora, Uncle Harold, and Corrine. I admit, Uncle Harold is my favorite. This story shows that people deal with grief and trauma in their own way, and I think Uncle Harold said it best: “You can’t control how someone else hurts. Can’t predict it either. And there’s always only one type of pain … and it’s always yours.” Cora knows a kind of pain that people can only sympathize with because not everyone had to deal with the trauma of integrating an all-white school in Nashville, TN, in the 1950s.
There’s trauma that older Black folks don’t like to talk about. I always thought it was frustrating because how am I supposed to know and understand what our people went through if no one talks about it. However, I get it. Some things you just want to keep bottled up, and you do what you have to do, cope however you can so that no one else who looks like you will have to deal with that. You exhibit that through Cora, and it’s one of the most heartbreaking scenes. I know this is fiction, but it’s like: I know it’s one thing to read about it but to live it is quite another. Reading about six or seven-year-old Cora as a student is heartbreaking because you know this has happened to someone. One of my favorite parts is one of the most gut-wrenching scenes, and that is the ending. Watching Cora explain to Harold and Corrine what she went through and why she doesn’t like talking about it will tear you in tears. (Hot tip: Do not listen to Naya Rivera sing “If I Die Young” while reading this book. While it fits, it will destroy you.)
It’s important to know that people deal with things in their own way, and we must give them grace. We’ll never know the true extent of what they went through when they went through it. While it is all the adjectives I used earlier, and it’s heavy, it’s worth it.
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