Night Swim by Jessica Keener

Summary from GoodReads:

Sixteen-year-old Sarah Kunitz lives in a posh, suburban world of 1970 Boston. From the outside, her parents’ lifestyle appears enviable – a world defined by cocktail parties, expensive cars, and live-in maids to care for their children – but inside their five-bedroom house, all is not well for the Kunitz family. Coming home from school, Sarah finds her well-dressed, pill-popping mother lying disheveled on their living room couch. At night, to escape their parents’ arguments, Sarah and her oldest brother, Peter, find solace in music, while her two younger brothers retreat to their rooms and imaginary lives. Any vestige of decorum and stability drains away when their mother dies in a car crash one terrible winter day. Soon after, their father, a self-absorbed, bombastic professor begins an affair with a younger colleague. Sarah, aggrieved, dives into two summer romances that lead to unforeseen consequences. In a story that will make you laugh and cry, Night Swim shows how a family, bound by heartache, learns to love again.

My Review:

This book surprised the heck out of me.  I don’t know what I loved more – Jessica Keener’s descriptions of the world contained within the book, or her ability to really capture the voice of each and every individual character. When I picked up Night Swim and started to read, I struggled a little bit to find a groove, figure out what Keener was doing, but man – once I got into a groove I couldn’t put this book down, to the detriment of the stacks upon stacks of homework I had to do.

A sort of coming-of-age story, but also a story about relationships between parents and children, different races and classes, religions, and more. This was a hodge-podge of everything that is dynamite in a story, and instead of overwhelming that story with too much, it worked very, very well, creating a compelling story that’s been stuck in my mind since I put the book down.

Every once in a while I pick up a book that I wouldn’t normally pick up in a book store.  The biggest complaint about this book is the cover, I find it way too boring and bland considering the content it’s hiding.  If I had seen it in a bookstore, I just wouldn’t have been interested – but I didn’t.  Instead I was hooked by a description and that hook was enough to get me to look past the cover and find the story.

Y’all, this one was very much worth the read.

About the Author

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