Told through emails, newspaper excerpts, family genealogies, and traditional narration, Cris Mazza’s latest book, “Waterbaby,” follows Tam Burgess, an epileptic woman and former swimmer who heads to Maine to help her sister with a family genealogy project.  While there, she becomes entranced with the fate of an ancestor, Mary Catherine, daughter of a lighthouse keeper, and the identity of the town ghost said to haunt the shore. 

“Waterbaby” explores the ways we construct histories – from personal histories to larger histories – and how this aids in forming identity, for better or worse.  By the end of the novel, Tam has a different relationship with many of the characters in the book – her brother, with whom she was intensely competitive, her ancestors, and her self. 

Mazza fills the novel with information about lighthouse keeping and the role of women in the mid- to late-nineteenth century.  These historical facts, however, are blended into the narrative in such a way that particularly intrigued me – as someone working on a novel set in the past and loosely based on family history, I learned from the way Mazza’s uses histories to speak back to and intertwine with the present action of the story.

The novel’s use of some unconventional forms of narrative also makes it a pleasure to read.  Through emails, we see the way families speak passed each other, never piecing together the full story or interpreting the story to fit their own reality.  The excerpts from old newspaper articles, books, and genealogies show that history is constantly being written and re-written, some facts included, some left behind, and some transformed to hold new meaning.