Swimming
by Nicola Keegan
List Price:
Our Price: $0.45
You Save: $25.50 (98%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions
Book Summary Information
Author: Nicola KeeganEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 2009-07-14
ISBN: 0307269973
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Book Reviews of Swimming
Book Review: A splash of life
Summary: 4 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Philomena "Pip" Ash is a 6'2" competitive swimmer in Kansas. Her colorful, Catholic family fails to put the fun in dysfunction--one sister (Bron) has cancer, Roxanne is a drug addict, and Dot is a tight-lipped martyr. Mom becomes agoraphobic after tragedy descends on the family too many times. Meanwhile, Pip swims and works obsessively to achieve her personal best so that she can make it to the Olympics.
The Holy Name School nuns and parishioners figure importantly in Pip's early life. When the family teeters on emotional collapse, they come in to support the family in target groups variously and cheekily titled (by Pip) The Encouraging Catholics, The Suffering Catholics, and The Dark Catholics. Her mother is unable to provide emotional support, slipping into her own oblivion and remaining aloof from her children. She is only quasi-involved with Pip's achievements and ambition; Pip's parental role is ministered by her swim coaches, first in high school and then in college.
This is less a story about a swimmer striving for the Olympics and more about the inner life of a long-suffering girl and her family. This is a novel about championing loss, of triumph over tragedy, about swimming very close to the dark abyss of oblivion. Although we are taken to the Olympics and plunge into Pip's heavy workouts at the pool, it almost feels peripheral to the real story of a wounded family desperate to heal. If you are hoping for a more conventional tale of the rise of an Olympiad--the hunger, the forces (with you and against you), the ferocity, the fierceness, the challenges--you may be disappointed. This is an offbeat tale of indomitable will and salvation, of crushing defeat, and of double-edged victories.
Keegan's prose is saucy, tart, fierce, poignant, wry, and radiant. It provides a grip on the reader and keeps us harnessed to Pip at all times. There are no quotation marks--italics are used instead, rendering a mood of self-containment and even isolation--symbolic of a swimmer's enclosure. Keegan's stylistic technique generally works; however, her sentence structure during the first half of the novel feels atonal. It darts around in a peppery, nervy, high-strung rhythm, providing no balanced relief. Splashy, anxiety-provoking sentences squeak with a twittery modulation. Although it mirrors Pip's moods, it lacks atmosphere and will keep you at a swimmer's arm's-length distance. What kept me fastened were the author's beautiful, potent words. Her metaphors and imagery are brilliant and her love of language is evident on every page.
The second half of the novel is more buoyant, with a richer, textured tempo and sentence structure, and I dove deeper into the waters of Pip's mind and life. She experiences a passionate, cleaving love and the angst of making decisions about her future. The erratic focus of the first half dissolved and the story acquired more clarity. The novel is non-linear, which is a method I (generally) find aesthetically pleasing. However, the author awkwardly segued back and forth from present to past, creating a sense of temporal dislocation that felt spurious and clumsy at intervals.
Although the story spans approximately fifteen years, it surfaces like a slice-of-life, with three-dimensional characters and obscure eccentricities superseding semblance of plot. Ongoing issues threaten to drown Pip even as she achieves her goals and matures into a young woman. The fall-out from grief and tragedy subsumes every chapter of Pip's life, jeopardizing her happiness. She is driven to break world records but lacks the skills to break through her mourning clouds. It's swim or die--her only anchor to sanity is the pool, but it also augurs her undoing.
This is an odd, ripe, sardonic, unsentimental tale that pushes, glides, kicks, and exalts with an unruly, deep-end spirit.
Fans of Miranda July will like Swimming--this author is easily her kindred spirit.
Summary of Swimming
?I loved Swimming. It?s the most original novel I?ve read all year. I can?t get Pip?s voice out of my mind. Give yourself a treat this summer?read this book.??Judy Blume
A spectacular debut about the rise of an Olympic champion?a novel about competition, obsession, the hunger for victory, and a young girl with an unsinkable spirit struggling to stay afloat in the only way she can.
When we first meet Pip, the extraordinary heroine of Nicola Keegan?s first novel, she is landlocked in a small town in the center of Kansas, literally swimming for her life. Pip is tall and flat and smart and funny and supernaturally buoyant. On land, she has her share of troubles: an agoraphobic mother, a lost father, a drug-addled sister, and a Catholic education dominated by a group of high-energy nuns. But in the water, Pip is unstoppable. In the water, her suffering and rage are transmuted into grace and speed and beauty.
Swimming is the story of Pip?s journey from a small Midwestern swim team to her first state meet, her brutal professional training, and the final, record-breaking swims that lead to her dizzying ascent to the Olympic podium in Barcelona. It?s the story of a girl who discovers, in the loneliness of adolescence, in the family tragedies that threaten to engulf her, the resilience of the human spirit and the spectacular power of her own body.
A ferociously original novel, sparkling with wit and blazing with emotion, from a gifted new novelist.
Irish Books
Book Subjects
- Arts & Photography
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Investing
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Computers & Internet
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- Entertainment
- Gay & Lesbian
- Health, Mind & Body
- History
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Law
- Literature & Fiction
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Professional & Technical
- Reference
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel
Most talked about in Irish Books
The Truth About Love (Vintage)by Josephine Hart
Vintage; Published: 2010-08-10; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.48
Price in other shops:
Contemporary Irish Dramaby Anthony Roche
Palgrave Macmillan; Published: 2009-09-15; Paperback; Book
Best price: $23.00
Price in other shops:
The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays: Riders to the Sea; The Shadow of the Glen; The Tinker's Wedding; The Well of the Saints; The Playboy ... of the Sorrows (Oxford World's Classics)by J. M. Synge
Oxford University Press, USA; Published: 2009-01-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.81
Price in other shops:
The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale (Oxford World's Classics)by Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan)
Oxford University Press, USA; Published: 1999-08-12; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.48
Price in other shops:
Son of Oscar Wilde (Oxford Paperbacks)by Vyvyan Holland
Oxford University Press, USA; Published: 1988-12-15; Paperback; Book
Best price: $105.46
The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories (Oxford Books of Prose)Oxford University Press, USA; Published: 2002-03-07; Paperback; Book
Best price: $14.04
Price in other shops:
The Bend For Home: A Memoirby Dermot Healy
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Published: 1998-03-15; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $3.75
Price in other shops:
The Playboy of the Western World and Two Other Irish Plays (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)by J. M. Synge, William Butler Yeats, Sean O'Casey
Penguin Classics; Published: 1997-05-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.77
Price in other shops:
Selected Poems and Three Plays of William Butler Yeatsby William Butler Yeats
Scribner Paper Fiction; Published: 1987-01-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.00
Price in other shops:
Nights of Rain and Starsby Maeve Binchy
Penguin Audio; Published: 2004-09-16; Audio CD; Book
Best price: $1.08
Price in other shops:
Similar Books and other products
A Visit from the Goon Squadby Jennifer Egan
Knopf; Published: 2010-06-08; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $13.55
Price in other shops:
The Dressmaker of Khair Khana: Five Sisters, One Remarkable Family, and the Woman Who Risked Everything to Keep Them Safeby Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
Harper; Published: 2011-03-15; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $5.99
Price in other shops:
The Windup Girlby Paolo Bacigalupi
Night Shade Books; Published: 2010-04-20; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.29
Price in other shops:
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Waoby Junot Diaz
Riverhead Trade; Published: 2008-09-02; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.99
Price in other shops:
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Timeby Mark Haddon
Vintage; Published: 2004-05-18; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.49
Price in other shops:
Brave New Worldby Aldous Huxley
Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Published: 2006-10-17; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.99
Price in other shops:
Cutting for Stoneby Abraham Verghese
Vintage; Published: 2010-01-26; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.82
Price in other shops:
The Financial Lives of the Poetsby Jess Walter
Harper; Published: 2009-09-22; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $1.75
Price in other shops:
A Million Little Piecesby James Frey
Anchor; Published: 2005-09-22; Paperback; Book
Best price: $2.19
Price in other shops:
The Tiger's Wife: A Novelby Tea Obreht
Random House; Published: 2011-03-08; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $10.00
Price in other shops: