Christina Baker Kline

©  Copyright 2009 Christina Baker Kline.  All Rights Reserved.
“Kline blends satisfying storytelling skills with psychological chills.  This book is filled with
secrets – as well as love, hate, revenge, and guilt.  Highly recommended.”
-- Library Journal (Named "One of the Most Promising New Novelists of the Year")

“The family arena, so rich in emotions and dramatic possibilities, is the setting, and Sweet
Water, with its dark secrets and charged atmosphere, could easily have gone over the top.  But
Kline skirts the pitfalls of her material nicely.  Cassie’s natural voice sets the tone.  A
thoughtful, humorous, believable woman, she holds our attention until the end.”
-- Cleveland Plain Dealer

”Sweet Water is one of those books that is a discovery.  I started it because it’s set in
Sweetwater, Tennessee.  I read it through because it sings … The novel shifts back and forth
between the voices of Cassie and her grandmother Clyde, and Clyde’s voice flows like music …
A story of the small-town South that rings with poetry and truth.”  
-- Knoxville News Sentinel

“An impressive first novel.”
-- Orlando Sentinel  

“What makes Christina Baker Kline’s first novel, Sweet Water, go is Cassie’s persistent
uncovering of family secrets …  Kline’s use of Cassie and Clyde as alternating narrators give
the story added dimension, the young woman’s eager pursuit of the facts juxtaposed nicely
against the old woman’s bitter retrospectives.  Kline keeps us glued to the page.”
-- Boston Globe

“Evocative writing.”
-- New York Times Book Review

“A compelling psychological study of bitterness, guilt and fear.”  
-- Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sweet Water

  • Literary Guild Alternate selection
  • Barnes and Noble Discover Award finalist
  • Readers Digest Condensed Book
  • Highly Recommended, Library Journal

”Kline’s first novel is a captivating read. In alternating sections
told from their respective points of view, Cassie and her about
the tragedy that marks both of their lives. Kline perfectly
renders each woman's voice: Cassie's, probing and often
uncertain, propels the narrative and creates an appropriate level
of psychological suspense; the grandmother's quavers with the
weight of memory as Cassie's search forces her beyond family
myth to a painful and perhaps dangerous truth. The result is a
powerful, immensely readable tale of loyalty and betrayal,
family and memory, made fresh by Kline's often beautiful and
always lucid prose.”
-- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Sweet Water
Described as both a Southern literary saga and a psychological thriller, this beautifully wrought
novel unfolding a daughter's search for the truth about her mother's death marks the debut of an
extraordinary writer.  A mysterious bequest, a mother’s terrible death, and a daughter’s search for
the truth about the past yields taut suspense in this powerful first novel.  Told in the alternating
voices of Cassie, an artist, and Clyde, her Southern grandmother, Kline vividly captures the
cultural differences between the North and the South, as well as the generation gap between the
two women.

Cassie Simon, a young sculptor living in New York, is tired of the city.  When her grandfather,
Amory, dies and leaves her his house in Sweetwater, Tennessee, she takes it as a sign and
decides to move to the little town where her mother, Ellen, was born – and where she died
tragically when Cassie was three.  So begins a spiritual and emotional quest of rare power, as
Cassie attempts to unravel the Clyde family myths about the accident that shattered their lives.

As Cassie delves into the thicket of mystery that surrounds her mother’s death, Clyde determines
to keep the truth – or what she thinks is the truth – from her granddaughter.  The closer Cassie
gets to unraveling the family myths, the more the reader understands the internal battles each
woman fights as she comes to terms with Ellen’s untimely death.  

Each discovery propels more questions.  Why did Ellen let her father drive her into town that night
when she knew he was drunk?  Why does Clyde seem so withdrawn and nervous as Cassie
settles into the house?  Is it just a coincidence that Clyde’s best friend, Bryce Davies, drowned
only a few weeks before Ellen’s death?  And why did Amory leave Cassie this house in the first
place?

The climax of Sweet Water (HarperCollins, 1993) reveals the desperate measures the human heart
is capable of, the damage that unresolved guilt and buried secrets can inflict, and the redemptive
power of memory and forgiveness.
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