Recently Read Books: The Scent of Water

The Scent of Water by Elizabeth Goudge (fiction)

This book is an older one, and I picked it up because I had read and loved her republished children’s fairytale entitled “The Little White Horse” (sweet story and delicious writing). While I would rate TLWH as a top-notch children’s book, The Scent of Water would not get the same rating as a story for grown-ups. The ending was not well done, and I feel like Goudge would have done better if she would have limited the story to focusing on her 2 main characters (Mary and her deceased aunt) and not included so many “inner thoughts” or stories about the people in the town, since she did not have quite enough time to properly finish all of their stories. Her descriptive writing is still amazing, and I absolutely loved learning about Mary’s deceased aunt’s story through her diary entries. The diary entries are incredibly unusual as they detail the aunt’s struggle with mental illness (panic attacks and depression) and what she learned of God’s tenderness through her struggles. This book is an older one, and the aunt’s story was set in the late 1800’s-early 1900’s, as a time when there was hardly any counsel or real help for ones who underwent battles of the mind. Those diary entries are probably worth wading through the ho-hum quality of the stories that occur whenever Goudge strays from Mary and the aunt as the main topic; the truths that the aunt learns and clings to in her struggle could have come from an old, precious devotional book.