Review: The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, by Joshilyn Jackson

She sees dead people.

Laurel Hawthorne, whose mother managed to escape from defunct mining town DeLop, AL (think X-Files scary) via marriage, is an improbably well-off young mother living in a beautiful gated community, where everyone has perfect lawns and pools. The only chinks in her life are her hot-and-cold relationship with her sister, Thalia, and the ghost of her dead uncle, which she hasn't seen in many years. Her husband is an extremely well-paid game developer, and she designs artistically unique quilts with hidden pockets and, we later learn, hidden meanings. Even her teenaged daughter, Shelby, is lovely. Laurel assuages her mild guilt over being so fortunate while many relatives reside in the emotional and financial squalor of DeLop by bringing Bet Clemens, her daughter's vaguely-related pen pal from De Lop, to stay with them for a few weeks each summer, and then returns to her tidy life.

Things are seemingly perfect until Molly, Shelby's best friend, wakes Laurel in the middle of the night. Molly has drowned in the Hawthorne's pool, and her ghost seeks Laurel's help in uncovering the truth of her tragic end. This event, horrible as it is, is the beginning of the end of Laurel's painstakingly created facade of perfection. With her conviction that Molly's death wasn't an accident, Laurel reaches out to her currently-estranged theater-actress sister, and the story of what actually happened, as well as what really happened with their uncle's death, come to light amongst Thalia's accusations and worming insinuations reagarding Laurel's marriage and family. As chapters pass, we learn, via Laurel's awakening, the hidden truth about the quilts, her uncle, her mother, Bet, Molly's death, and the realization that the title refers not only to Molly.

The beginning of The Girl... is slow, so much so that I actually considered walking away from it altogether. I didn't find Laurel to be incredibly engrossing, and the whole situation began to seem like a typical dysfunctional-relationship piece of chick-lit. For some reason, I picked it up again the next day, and skimmed through a few chapters, only to find myself drawn pretty deeply in once Thalia's character becomes involved, and the story began to unravel. One of the plot points I liked the most is that the reader only follows Laurel's piont of view, so as her ideas of what is actually happening twist and turn, we are brought along with her, rather than the reader's knowing what has happened and waiting for her to figure it out. The final few chapters in particular are real page-turners, starting from about the point where questions begin to arise about the solidity of Laurel's marriage, and I couldn't put it down after that. The ending was very exciting, although again improbably resolved, and although the afterward was a tiny bit trite, it didn't take away from the rest of the novel.

Rating: three out of five stars - not as good as I'd hoped, but still a decent, quick summer read