Swimming
Naked
By
Stacy Sims
Lucy
Greene is an adult who lives life hard and she avoids emotional
attachments and commitments. While Lucy is an attractive, appealing
young woman, she has a cynical outlook on life and her life lacks
personal relationships. She is neither close to her mother nor her
sister, has no girlfriends, and her interactions with men never
transcend the occasional sexual fling. Lucy is a heavy smoker, a
junk food eater, and a non-exerciser. She simply does not nurture
herself or others.
At
the beginning of Swimming Naked, Lucy finds herself navigating
unfamiliar emotional territory when she travels south to Florida
where her mother is dying in a hospital from a terminal illness.
As Lucy sits by her mother's side, her memories go back in time
and she revisits a summer vacation in Canada that changed her life
forever. There was an accident at their vacation lake house, which
apparently led to the subsequent disappearance of her father. After
their father left, Lucy and her sister were subject to their mother's
whims and desires as to the course their lives would take.
Lucy
holds dear a long-ago memory of a late night "skinny dipping"
swim with her mother and that memory helps her survive the ordeal
of watching her mother succumb to cancer. Swimming Naked
is a story of Lucy's bitterness and hurt over unresolved family
issues and how the present, despite devastating circumstances, permits
her to let go of some of her pain and to forgive her mother for
past transgressions. Swimming Naked is an impressive debut
novel, which I highly recommend to fans of literary fiction and
women's fiction.
|
The
Book |
Plume
(Penguin Putnam) |
March
2005 |
Trade
Paperback |
0452285607
|
Literary
fiction / women's fiction |
More
at Amazon.com |
Excerpt
|
NOTE:
|
The
Reviewer |
Shannon I. Bigham |
Reviewed
2005 |
NOTE:
|
|