Don’t judge a book by its cover

When I picked up the girl who stopped swimming, I thought it was going to be one of those books in which a competitive athlete (in this case a swimmer) gets injured, and a the rest of the plot revolves around the girl’s emotional woes as she sits on the sidelines, watching her team go on without her.

This was not the case at all. I could tell that from the very first line—“Until the drowned girl came to Laurel’s bedroom, ghosts had never walked in Victorianna.” So if you expect a clichéd sports novel, you are not going to find it here. You will find the furthest thing from it.

Laurel Gray Hawthorne, a 32-year-old woman, wakes up to find her preteen daughter Shelby’s best friend standing over her. The ghost takes her to the window, where Laurel sees the ghost’s body floating facedown in her own backyard pool.  Any woman who finds a dead girl in her pool is suspicious, disturbed, and of course, just plain curious. So Laurel sets out to find why this little girl, Molly, is dead.

Laurel herself is a character not typically explored in teen novels, a suburban mom married to her college sweetheart who knocked her up at nineteen. Her sister Thalia, who Laurel reaches out to in this time of crisis, adds more intrigue—she runs a firehouse-converted-theatre with her gay husband, and won’t stop digging at the fact that Shelby, or her cousin Bet from the drug and poverty-ridden town of DeLop, might be involved in the death.

The narration flows easily and seamlessly between the present, a few years past, and Laurel and Thalia’s childhood, managing to explain why the sisters think the way they do and connecting the plot of the novel to their own pasts.

Twists fill the plot of the novel. These surprises throw readers off, like when a “suspect” (in Laurel’s eyes) of the murder turns out not to be the killer, but just your regular male prostitute who happens to have been lurking at the crime scene, or when the misinterpretation of an Ouija board leads to the near death of little Shelby.

This is more than your typical Southern murder-mystery. It focuses heavily on that, yes, but it’s also a novel about finding the past, realizing what is important to you, and facing your ghosts.

If you’re seeking a bouncy-happy story in which small problems are tidily solved and things are happily-ever-after in the end, look elsewhere. This is a complex book with a satisfying ending— not overly Disney-happy, and not purely grim either.