“Terry Gamble is a gifted writer, elegant, precise, evocative, and humane. Her work is highly intelligent, skillful, and, most important, full of heart and soul. This is beautiful writing.”

—Lynn Freed

“Terry Gamble is a gifted writer, elegant, precise, evocative, and humane. Her work is highly intelligent, skillful, and, most important, full of heart and soul. This is beautiful writing.”

—Anne Lamott

“In this luminious first novel, Gamble...imparts a remarkable sense of place while launching a searing indictment of prejudice, all the while demonstrating a restrained, understated lyricism that only serves to heighten the novel’s power.”

“Gamble manages to represent many of the racial, economic and political complexities of Native American community life without preaching, and her prose is fast-paced but capable of evoking strong images.

Her graceful style achieves its ends on multiple levels, making The Water Dancers a vivid reading experience that, to its great credit, never becomes predictable.”

“[W]ell-drawn characters and engaging prose.”

“[R]eadable and fresh.”

This engrossing upstairs-downstairs account of tragic love is set at an old- money summer community (“chock-full of summer houses, all white and lined up like pearls on a necklace”) on the northern shores of Lake Michigan in the years just following World War II. Woody March, the last surviving male heir of one of the privileged families who summer on the lake—his house “smelled of must, camphor, lilacs and decayed fish”—falls in love with Rachel Winnapee, a 16-year-old orphan from a local Indian tribe hired for the season as a servant. Physically and emotionally battered by his experiences in the war, Woody sees Rachel as potentially the source of his salvation. But when she becomes pregnant with his child, forces beyond their control work to separate them. Years pass and their paths don’t intersect—Woody marries the kind of woman he’s expected to marry, Rachel becomes a destitute single mother—until she returns to claim her inheritance, and her son’s, with predictably explosive results. Several of the characters here veer toward stereotype, and Rachel’s intimate connection to nature can be a bit hard to swallow: “She picked up a stone, tasted it—an ancient rock... rich with magma and desire.” Yet Gamble’s voice is often fresh and assured, yielding a first novel that bodes well for her second.

Marketplace Real Estate CareerSite Automotive Classifieds News Local News Headline News Separate and Unequal Breaking News (AP) Photo Gallery Traffic WHILE most people take a short summer vacation, an elite group “summers” for months in resort communities. Films and books have created a romantic image of this lifestyle, for the most part set on East Coast beachfronts.

In “The Water Dancers” (William Morrow $24.95), San Francisco author Terry Gamble brings to life a mid-20th-century resort community in Northern Michigan. Her faithful rendering of the privileges and problems of upper class life is drawn from having been one of the elite summer residents of Harbor Point, the model for Beck’s Point.

Gamble grew up in the 1960s, when the social conventions she saw in Harbor Point were quaint anachronisms. Privilege still existed, but social structures were fraying. In the face of such change, elite power circles grew even tighter and closed to outsiders. More...

Like a Petoskey stone reveals itself when you lick it, Terry Gamble’s book, “The Water Dancer,” has something you don’t see below the surface until almost all the pages are turned.

Gamble has spent a part of every summer of her life at a cottage at Harbor Point near Harbor Springs. (Hence the Petoskey stone as one of the book’s images.) In her writing, she draws heavily on items others would take for granted: Native American quill boxes, stones, the waters of Lake Michigan, pow wows and fry bread. She uses all these vehicles and more to tell the story of a summer love affair between a wealthy privileged WWII veteran and a Native American maid, the resulting child and a 20-year path to reconciliation and closure.

“The Water Dancers,” her first book, follows the complex life of Rachel Winnapee as she goes from a 16-year-old single parent to a strong adult woman seeking answers in life for herself and her son. Several characters help wrap the package. Winnapee’s lover and father of the child, Woody March, is an addicted amputee who finds solace and redemption at the summer home. His mother is a vital protagonist who oversees her family and its life at the beach house in northern Michigan. More...

Here's the beauty of Water Dancers: It can be all kinds of things to all kinds of people.

Terry Gamble's elegantly written, handsomely constructed debut novel is: An upstairs-downstairs saga in a supposedly classless society; a romance; a love letter to tree huggers; a weepy girl meets/gets/loses boy story; an up-close and personal look at the social changes that began after World War II and continued into the Vietnam era; a look at lifestyles long gone; a voyeur's guide to lives of the very rich; a voyeur's guide to the lives of the very poor; the story of white Europeans gobbling up land belonging to American Indians; a traveler's guide to a Northern Michigan enclave of "summer people."

Whew! Hardly time to squeeze a plot in, you're thinking.

Wrong.

Gamble, a fifth-generation descendant of P&G co-founder James Gamble, grew up in Northern California (her father left here 60-something years ago for college and never came back), but spent summers in Harbor Point on Lake Michigan's Little Traverse Bay, a wealthy community of summer cottages - cottage is a code word for 10 bedrooms and a servants' wing - owned by big-money types who could afford to take summers off. It's the model for Dancers' Beck's Point and very similar to Charlevoix, where a lot of Cincinnati's old money summers. More...