SOURCE: “Family Tug-of-War over a Plot of Land,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 29, 1993, p. E8.

In the following review, Goodrich offers a mixed assessment of The Forms of Water.

[In The Forms of Water] Henry Auberon has returned with his Uncle Brendan to Coreopsis Heights, the real-estate subdivision that proved to be his undoing.

Half-built houses, bulldozer slashes in the hillside, dried mud, aging lumber, even squatters: It's a grisly reminder of failure, but Henry sees, perhaps for the first time, that no amount of risk would have prevented him from developing the family land.

“Gone, he thought. All of it. And as he continued to look at his uncle's face, he wondered if Coreopsis Heights had not been, all along, simply the only way he could find to destroy the memory of his childhood there”—that what he felt while watching his grandparents' homestead fall...