Swimming Naked
by Stacy Sims
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Book Summary Information
Author: Stacy SimsEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-02-22
ISBN: 0452285607
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Plume
Book Reviews of Swimming Naked
Book Review: A Story You'll Never Forget
Summary: 5 Stars
At first blush the Greene family appears normal, or at least close to it. As the story opens we see them on their way to vacation in the summerhouse they rent every year. The girls, Anna and Lucy, have to go to the bathroom and can hardly wait to get into the house, the parents are smoking like chimneys, the house is musty and full of remembered odors. Lucy expects the vacation to go the way of all the others she remembers. It does not.
That first night Fay, Lucy's mother, invites her down to the beach and together, mother and daughter go swimming naked. This is a special moment for Lucy and she sees her mother in a new light. Older sister Anna knows something has happened, but Lucy keeps her silence as the vacation continues. Then as they are getting ready to go home, a violent storm rocks the night, but Fay insistes that Lucy's father load up the car, despite the weather. He is struck by lightning. Not only has the lightning left is mark tattooed on his back, but it has left him simple minded and one day he just goes away.
Jump to the present, Lucy is thirty-two, a hard as nails woman who takes men when she wants them, no love involved. She's got a great job in the art world. She's living life the way she wants. Then she gets a call from Bella, the woman who lives across the street from her mother down in Florida. Fay is dying of lung cancer. Lucy goes to her mother's bedside and finds out that Anna knew that Fay was ill and told no one, now it is too late to help her, the cancer is too far along. But before Lucy can berate her sister, she finds out that Anna is back in rehab. Then Fay tells Lucy that her father is still alive and in Florida. This shocks her as she'd believed he had been dead for years.
And all of the above is woven together with the spinning wheel of a classic wordsmith. Ms. Sims gradually strips away the outer skin supposedly normal folk show the world, revealing a dysfunctional group of people that barely qualify as a family. Then she takes Fay's illness and impending death, Anna's lack of care for anybody but herself, Lucy's pent up anger and uses it all to bind a pair of sisters together in a way you'll never forget.
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