The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

Jackson matches effortless Southern storytelling with a keen eye for character and heart-stopping circumstances... What makes this novel shine are its revelations about the dark side of Southern society and Thalia and Laurel's finely honed relationship, which shows just how much thicker blood is than water.
     -Publishers Weekly

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Laurel Gray Hawthorne needs to make things pretty, whether she's helping her mother make sure the very literal family skeleton stays buried or turning scraps of fabric into nationally acclaimed art quilts. Her estranged sister Thalia, an impoverished Actress with a capital A, is her polar opposite, priding herself on exposing the lurid truth lurking behind middle class niceties. While Laurel's life seems neat and on track--a passionate marriage, a treasured daughter, and a lovely home in suburban Victorianna--everything she holds dear is suddenly thrown into question the night she is visited by the ghost of a her 14-year old neighbor Molly Dufresne.

The ghost leads Laurel to the real Molly floating lifelessly in the Hawthorne's backyard pool. Molly's death is inexplicable--an unseemly mystery Laurel knows no one in her whitewashed neighborhood is up to solving. Only her wayward, unpredictable sister is right for the task, but calling in a favor from Thalia is like walking straight into a frying pan protected only by Crisco. Enlisting Thalia's help, Laurel sets out on a life-altering journey that triggers startling revelations about her family's guarded past, the true state of her marriage, and the girl who stopped swimming.

 

Link to Reviews

Advance praise for The Girl Who
Stopped Swimming

 

On the heels of the successful gods in Alabama and Between, Georgia - both #1 BookSense picks - Jackson again reinvents the GRITS (Girls Raised in the South) novel. Quilt artist Laurel, her game programmer husband, David, and their 13-year-old daughter, Shelby, lead a seemingly charmed life in a serene Florida suburb. But when the ghost of a drowned girl awakens Laurel, the veneer of that life seems ready to crack beyond repair. Can Laurel trust her flamboyant, outspoken sister, Thalia, to help as old family secrets emerge with dizzying speed? With the appearance of a ghost on the first page, you'll feel compelled to race to the end, but slow down for Jackson's great descriptions - you'll be rewarded for the effort. Jackson illuminates not just the complexities of family love as a source of safety and support but also the complexities of danger and death. The life-affirming epilog provides satisfying closure; libraries will want to own all three novels.
     -Library Journal

Joshilyn Jackson has done it again. With a storyteller's easy grace, she whisks readers between bourgeois Victorianna, where dirty laundry and family drunks are secured firmly behind a Sunbonnet Sue exterior, and the unfathomable poverty of DeLop, a town of single-wides, chained pitbulls and no way out - unless you're willing to sacrifice your very soul. Nothing is quite as it seems, and Jackson's skilful unraveling of family secrets and betrayal left me breathless. You must read this book!
     - Sara Gruen, NYT Bestselling author of Water for Elephants and Riding Lessons

In The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, Joshilyn Jackson tells a mysterious, mournful story, and adds to what is shaping up as her great strength as a novelist: a deep, empathetic understanding of the impoverished (in both the earthly and in spirit), and a genius for unveiling the complexities of the South. Even in a page-turner like this, where the 'who' and the 'how' compel the book and fascinate the reader, she never fails to be humane, or to turn a kind eye toward every condition."
     - Haven Kimmel Author of The Solace of Leaving Early, A Girl Named Zippy, and The Used World

Do you crave a novel that will cause you to skip work or miss meals or put off sleep in order to keep reading it? In that case, you will definitely want to get hold of Joshilyn Jackson's latest. The Girl Who Stopped Swimming is lushly southern, and just darn good story-telling. Laurel is one of the best characters to come out of a modern novel in a very long time. In fact, she's one of the best characters to come from anywhere in what seems forever! Joshilyn had me from the moment the drowned girl walked into Laurel's bedroom which, by the way, was in the first sentence!
     - Homer Hickam, author of October Sky and The Far Reaches

 

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