Set in the mid 1800's, this story portrays the austere existence of three sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, with their father, Captain Wolf, on a desolate, windswept island penal colony across the harbor from Sydney. The author patterns the personalities of the three sisters after the Bronte sisters, imbuing them with Puritan sensibilities and a desire to become published authors. Wolf believes himself to be an enlightened, well-read governor of the colony, wielding a firm but fair discipline over the convicts on the island; but the sisters gradually are exposed to the crueler, despotic and controlling aspects of his regime and begin to plot against him to wrest from him some control of their own lives.

The Wolf sisters are in their 20's and 30's, however the Captain will not consider allowing any of them to leave the island, and they fear they have no marketable skills or way of supporting themselves in the real world. Of course, their prospects for snaring husbands are limited to the officers on the island, none of whom have been particularly interesting or presentable, except for one who turned out to be already married. Fearful of their fate if their father is killed in the line of duty, they vow to write novels and achieve some notoriety and income.

Emily falls desperately in love with one of the Irish convicts who had been assigned to be her father's valet. When this infatuation is discovered, Wolf throws the main into solitary confinement. Wolf becomes increasingly paranoid and depressed and settles into a blight and malaise that prevents him from doing his job. The girls are fearful for their future, and Charlotte, the strong-headed leader of the group, works behind the scenes to get her father reassigned away from the island.

The pace of the action in the last chapters of the novel increase as the sisters are involved in an escape attempt and are caught in the violence of a prison uprising in which their home and many of their possessions are destroyed. The struggle of the sisters to thrive in the narrow confines of the life imposed on them by their father is commendable. In spite of their surroundings and limitations, they each become strong-willed, competent, educated young women, much like the Bronte sisters. Coldwater is an interesting, complex historical romance novel, but it certainly makes me thankful to be a woman in the 20th and 21st centuries, rather than the 19th century!

Coldwater, basically, is based on the lives of the 3 Bronte sisters; Charlotte, Anne, and Emily, writers of "Jane Eyre," "Agnes Grey," and "Wuthering Heights" respectively. McConnochie, taking what little is known about the three and reimagines their lives with this engrossing novel.

It is set on Coldwater, an island off the coast of Australia and home to a penal colony where their father is sort of the governor/prison warden. The sisters dream of being novelists and getting as far away from Coldwater as possible, where they are miserable. They decide to use their writing talents to earn money and help them to move back to England.

McConnochie tells the story through each characters eyes, switching narratives and at times even writing style. McConnochie does a great job, I think, of switching to each characters' unique personality. I can't say that I have read a lot of Bronte (I've only read Jane Eyre all the way through) but I think she may even switch writing style according to character because Charlotte and Emily's sections are in first person, while Anne's in third. An ambitious first novel, I think McConnochie handled it with style and I will definitely keep my eye out for more from her.

Coldwater is a thrilling, chilling, and fulfilling book. It is about three sisters who live on the penal colony island of Coldwater with their father, Captain Wolf, in the 1830's. Charlotte, Anne, and Emily, however, are not children, but in their late 20's and early 30's. The main character, Charlotte, becomes worried after a prisoner's attack on her father nearly takes his life. With no friends or family, they'd have nowhere to go if her father died, so she decides she and her sisters should take up writing-so they do. But Emily soon falls for an Irish convict, with whom she meets in dreams, and somehow they know each other. Their father falls into an illness, half mental, half physical, and the island is soon in chaos as the prisoners plan an uprising. With secret meetings of all sorts, the islanders become woven into an intricate web of plot.
Although I found this a very good book, I neither felt nor understood the sibling relationships. The introduction of two new characters towards the end of the book caused slight shock, for they really had a lot to do with the plot from the beginning and were not even mentioned until the last 80 pages, and it gets slightly gory in the end. However, my final impression was quite good, and I would definitely recommend it.