COLORFULLY WOVEN PORTRAIT OF FAMILY SECRETS — A REVIEW

Laurel Gray Hawthorne’s life in Florida in a lovely gated community is a far cry from the town in Alabama where her mother grew up. And although she, her mother, and her sister Thalia visit DeLop every Christmas with presents for the poor relatives, there is no emotional connection between them. It is almost as though Laurel’s mother has wiped the mud off of her shoes whenever she leaves the town behind, and has taught her daughters to do the same.

But Laurel is plagued by ghosts of the past in the form of Uncle Marty, whose death was a shooting accident. But there are shadowy memories that hint at something else.

Protected and cocooned on Chapel Circle, though, Laurel feels safe as long as she can keep the ghost outside her home. But then one night in the summer, another ghost comes into her room. A blond girl, who leads her outside to the swimming pool…and there she sees the drowned girl.

From this point on, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming leads the reader through many twists and turns, as Laurel and her sister Thalia try to sort out what happened to the girl, who was a neighbor named Molly. Did Laurel’s daughter Shelby know more than she is saying? And what does mysterious Bet Clemmens, visiting from DeLop, know?

Does the strange single man living in an adjacent neighborhood have anything to do with the death? Or are Molly’s violently quarreling parents the villains in this piece? Meanwhile, Thalia is determined to rescue her sister from what she believes to be the deadly placidity of her life. Will she succeed? Or will Laurel finally discover what truly makes her happy?

This was a wonderfully colorful and suspenseful tale that kept clutching at me as I turned the pages, trying to guess what would happen. I felt uneasy about one or more of the characters all along, feeling suspicious of them and wanting to point fingers. With the final reveal, though, I felt horror, sadness, and that gasp of “a-ha,” as if I could have surely seen it all unfolding in just this way. Definitely a five star read.