"I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same." According to 15-year-old Magdalena"s mother, the world is strange, beautiful, and watery-full of secrets and discoveries known only to mother and daughter. But when her mother dies suspiciously, it becomes an arid world of anxiety, sexual confusion, and desperate loneliness, where an imaginary family of bickering fish torment her. Magda"s only outlet is the beautiful but destructive fires she starts in the marshes near her house. As her father and aunt try to pull her into a mundane world of school, schedules, and stepmothers, the voices of the fish in her head tempt her toward insanity. Magda must plot a course between her mother"s fatal madness and her father"s soul-destroying normalcy. The Shape of Water is a darkly lyrical and surprising tapestry of mundane and imaginative worlds. Magda untangles family secrets, struggles to cope with profound loss, and finally discovers a stable place in the world-without compromising herself.