the girl who stopped swimming Joshilyn Jackson

My mother often complains after she reads a book I've recommended: Why are they always so dark? She and my step call me twisted sister. So last weekend when I plucked this book from her shelves, I figured I was in for some kind of family drama, but one where all's well that ends well. The fact that this book was in her house can only be explained by what I confirmed three days later: she hasn't read it. She picked it up and hadn't gotten to it yet. Unfortunately, I had to tell her not to read it, but not because I didn't like it.

TGWSS is about family, dysfunction, ghosts, abuse, guilt, hurt, you name it. And it's all swirling around the edges of a decent whodunit. The story centers on Laurel, who sees ghosts. She is married to David and has a daughter Shelby. She also has a lunatic sister Thalia, to whom she has not spoken in years. The book opens on the night the ghost of a little girl who drowned in Laure's pool appears to her. Her husband calls in her mother for reinforcement, but she immediately jumps in the car and rushes to find her sister for help. It establishes a lot about their familial relations.

The two sisters set to trying to unravel the mystery of how the dead girl ended up in Laurel's pool, and all the while Thalia is trying to unravel Laurel's marriage. In the interim, Laurel's relationship with her mother finally unravels for good. There is a lot of unraveling going on.

There is also a lot of ugly. Big secrets, the kind you've grown to expect, lurk in the closets of Laurel and Thalia, their mother, Laurel's daughter, pretty much everyone. What's compelling is that even when you KNOW what the secret is, the reading of it does not disappoint and the characters are not reduced to placeholders you read about in so many other novels. The fact that Jackson does this so well is doubly important because it also sets the stage for the kind of awful at the end that you probably didn't see coming and wouldn't be able to stomach, except for on second though you did see it coming, a little bit. Jackson just takes you further than you expected to go, and then some.

Jackson does a great job of capturing the complexities of relationships. Most evidently in the Thalia, Laurel, David triangle. Thalia can't understand David, who won't understand Thalia. They share Laurel resentfully. But the triangle provides some poignant moments where Jackson is able to display truths in relationships that are usually barely hinted at. What does infidelity look like? To whom? Is it different for different relationships?

Most interesting for me, because I love a ghost story, is how the novel explores what we do and don't see and how and why and where. Once you open your eyes, you can't ever close them again against what you saw. Thalia and Laurel learn that the hard way.