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supporters get and sign up at about progress.com slash support. Welcome to More Personal, where we lean into the personal side of Personal Development.

I'm Monica Packer and today's feature is the book report.

Today I am sharing a no spoiler report on my very favorite book from 2023 and top three favorite of all time the covenant of water by

Abraham for geese. I have been dying to share my report and also my review of this amazing book with you.

We are always going to start these book reports with a quick summary and this is my own summary here we go

the covenant of water is a sweeping novel that depicts three generations of a family set in southwest India from the years

1900 to 1970.

It begins as a 12-year-old girl is preparing to enter an arranged marriage with a 40-year-old widower.

Now, while the start like that would typically be enough to deter me from being interested in

a story like this, it quickly becomes one that paints the picture

of the faith, family, and frailty that weave humanity together, both insularly within families

and extending outward to the other lives

that get interwoven as important threads

that make up the fables of a family's history.

The Covenant of Water is a book that takes itself pretty seriously.

It's 724 pages, it's 10 parts parts and it has 84 chapters.

Where it lacks in humor, and it's not very funny,

it does make up for in striking commentary of what it means to be human, but done so in ways

that feel like allegories rather than sermons. That young girl becomes this Christian family's matriarch nicknamed Big Amici that oversees

decades of both beauty and pain in ways that are small and large, cutting and devastating,

...