Swimming Lessons

Today I posted an interview with Mary Alice Monroe I did earlier in the month. Two of the author's other books sit on my all-time keeper shelf. While Swimming Lessons isn't quite an all-time keeper, it's a very good read nonetheless. I first wrote about the book in my Senses ATBF, and described it a little further in today's interview. While it's a sequel to The Beach House, which was published five years ago, more or less it stands alone.

The Beach House focused on Cara, her relationship with her mother Lovie, and the love she finds with Brett, but introduced the character of Toy, a young, pregnant woman who, after being abandoned by her abusive boyfriend, is taken in by Lovie.

Swimming Lessons, set five years after the end of The Beach House, focuses on Toy, who, after the death of Lovie, assumes her place among the other "turtle ladies" who watch over the annual egg-laying and hatching of baby turtles on their island in South Carolina's Lowcountry.

I can appreciate nature, but given the choice between the city and the country, the city wins out every time. Which is why it's all the more remarkable that I love Monroe's books, which so strongly focus on nature. I think it's the animal focus...I may be a city girl, but I'm also an animal lover. When I was pregnant, one of our cats at the time was gravely ill with liver damage and the vet was sure he would die. I nursed him, day and night, for months by hand-feeding him, talking to him, crying with him, and holding him. He eventually recovered, his liver regenerated, and our vet called it a miracle.

There's no sick turtle in The Beach House, although there are plenty of injured souls to go around. But one of the main characters in Swimming Lessons is a gravely ill sea turtle Toy christens "Big Girl". As Toy nurses Big Girl back to health, she adds to the life she rebuilt in the past five years by allowing Ethan - a mariune biologist who also works at the aquarium where she is an aquarist - in.

The book is far more women's fiction than romance, but the romance between Ethan and Toy is wonderful. Ethan is a quietly observant sort of hero; he's the kind of guy who would check the spark plugs on your car before you left on a road trip. He's totally reliable, yet willing to give Toy the space she needs...until he can't anymore and won't allow her to push him away when she clearly needs the help he offers. This occurs at a tumultuous juncture, and it's a testament to the author's skill that even though I didn't fully buy into some of what led to the drama at hand, I was totally invested nonetheless.

I've written before how I love words and lush language, but not so lush that it becomes purple. Monroe never comes close to crossing that line; her descriptions simply fit the place about which she writes. All lovers of Southern fiction know what I mean by that, I think. There's a certain sort of prose that simply fits the hot and humid and fecund Lowcountry, and authors like Pat Conroy, Anne Rivers Siddons, Mary Alice Monroe, and to a lesser extent, Dorothea Benton Frank, all manage to utilize it so that the reader experiences the sights, smells, and sounds first hand.

Sometimes terms like "heartwarming" are viewed as synonymous as "sentimental", with the latter given a pejorative tinge in our post-ironic culture. And yet I can't think of a better word to describe Monroe's books than "heartwarming". Swimming Lessons ends with a two-hanky scene that I originally read as perhaps overly sentimental...until I learned in the course of our interview that what the author had written for Toy was something she herself had experienced. I re-read the scene in a less cynical light and cried all over again, and, no, I was not PMS'ing at the time.

In the end, Mary Alice Monroe's latest book doesn't quite land on my all-time keeper shelf, but it comes close. My grade? A B+ thisclose to an A-.

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

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