Review: The Swimming Pool by Holy LeCraw
Reviewed by Amelie L.
If you’re in the mood for a long, deep dive into water, The Swimming Pool will take you and wrap you in its spell. An unsolved murder lurks at its heart and laps at its edges, surrounded by years and layers of secrets, love and betrayal.
The writing is gorgeous, as rich and redolent as a Cape Cod summer. Deftly, Ms. LeCraw draws complicated, tangled relationships; between siblings, parents and children, memory and longing. The story is set in motion by a bathing suit; evocative, beautiful, it stirs the waters of a young man’s recollections and draws him forward. His quest is full of nuance and elegance, pain and an intoxicating, contagious desire. Often it is as much what the writer doesn’t say as what she does that moves the story along. Brother and sister, father and son, husband and wife, all breathe and speak the pulse of real life in its most tender, untouched territory.
There is a mesmerizing sensuality to this book; I wanted the mystery solved, the prime suspect vindicated and the lovers resolved with a happy ending but I also didn’t. The mystery, as full of shadows and light as water, were part of the intoxication of reading.
Illicit love can be impossible to write without creating villains but The Swimming Pool manages to take us into the heat of forbidden desire willingly.
“It was easy, at the beginning, not to think. He swam, constantly, in desire. One weekend he left her house to go for a run, and as he ran, on the sand-edged roads near the beach, he felt he was more fully aware of his own body than he had ever been before. He could feel every strand of muscle flexing, every drop of blood rushing through his heart. This was what desire was like. He had had girlfriends before but never someone he had craved, like a drug.”
So it is for the reader, pulled into surrender into the passions of a beautiful book.
Amelie lives and works on a pond in Cape Cod. She shares her home with her husband and two sons and both reads and writes whenever possible. Her ‘day job’ is in social services.
This book was provided free of any obligation by Doubleday. No monetary or any other form of compensation was received.
Category: Literature & Fiction, Mystery & Thrillers
I love Cape Cod and want to go back so much! So this is a great setting for a book. There is a special feeliing about the place, the beach, the small towns, the interesting houses. I really want go back. An unsolved murder makes me want to read this book even more.
Carol Wong
It is interesting Jen how people do not always like the same books. My on-line book club ‘From Left to Write’ and I are never on the same page. I dislike what most people like, and just the opposite with other books.
I frequently find myself in this situation, with the books I love not being another’s cup of tea. I picked ‘A Gesture Life’ years ago for my local book club and everyone hated it. I had loved the book and no one had a nice thing to say about it. Very embarrassing. Then we read the ‘Celestine Prophecy’ and it was the same thing in reverse. I hated the book.
Is it me or just the clubs I find myself in? I wonder.
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I had this out from the library before your review posted. For some reason, I just couldn’t get into it. I didn’t read in very far, but lost interest and the book just sat untouched for a week.
Now that I read this review, I really wish I had read on. I guess I did not give the book enough of a chance!
Beautiful review Amelie. You should probably be writing cover blurbs for books. Your review makes me want to read this book right now. The complicated family dynamics might curtail my interest but I love a good murder mystery. I think it must be genre that is hard to write, because so few murder mysteries are done well. I love the ones written in the 1940s by James McCain. If anyone has some good suggestions for murder mysteries, I would be interested in seeing your picks.
The cover of the book reminds me of David Hockney’s swimming pool paintings.
Great review and interesting how you viewed this book so differently from me. The concept of the book was great , I just could not follow the story-the sister was too whiny and annoying for me. The author did a great job with the tangled web of family members that she wove.
Wow, Amelie — that review was beautiful! Lyrical, even. It made me think of swimming, actually …
The cover of this is absolutely stunning. I remember spending summers growing up at my grandparents’ farm in Florida, with the pool out back … It glimmered a slightly darker blue than what’s on the cover, but the image is similar enough to my memory-images to make me slip away to that other time … Pools, and water in general, are so — memorably-powerful. They’re evocative. Fascinating. Dangerous. And beautiful. This book sounds like it meets the challege of a ‘pool’ well … This is definitely going on the To-Read list!
Wow, awesome review! I remember seeing this earlier in the year and putting it on my TBR list because it sounds interesting, but after this review I want it now! This is going to the top of the list
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I think I need to add this one to mt TO READ list!