Title: Swimming at Night (The Sea Sisters)
Author: Lucy Clarke
Publisher: Touchstone
Read: June 12 - 13, 2013
Synopsis (Goodreads):
People go traveling for two reasons: because they are searching for something, or they are running from something. Katie’s world is shattered by the news that her headstrong and bohemian younger sister, Mia, has been found dead at the bottom of a cliff in Bali. The authorities say that Mia jumped—that her death was a suicide.
Although they’d hardly spoken to each other since Mia suddenly left on an around-the-world trip six months earlier, Katie refuses to accept that her sister would have taken her own life. Distraught that they never made peace, Katie leaves her orderly, sheltered life in London behind and embarks on a journey to find out the truth. With only the entries in Mia’s travel journal as her guide, Katie retraces the last few months of her sister’s life and—page by page, country by country—begins to uncover the mystery surrounding her death. . . .
Weaving together the exotic settings and suspenseful twists of Alex Garland’s The Beach with a powerful tale of familial love in the spirit of Rosamund Lupton’s Sister, Swimming at Night is a fast-paced, accomplished, and gripping debut novel of secrets, loss, and forgiveness.
My thoughts:
Swimming at Night is the second book about a close sister
bond I have read this week, each one quite different in style and content and
providing unique insights into the complexities of sibling relationships.
When Katie finds out that her younger sister Mia has
committed suicide by jumping off a cliff in Bali, she is understandably
distraught, especially since the last conversation she had with her sister
shortly before her death ended up in a huge argument. Despite their differences
and Mia’s impulsive nature, Katie can’t believe that her sister would take her
own life. Presented with Mia’s travel journal, Katie decides to retrace her
sister’s footsteps to shed light on the reasons for her actions.
Although the premise of the story really appealed to me and
made me instantly request this book from netgalley, I feel quite divided about
the execution of the novel and it was not without flaws for me. The idea seemed
unique and brilliant – a sister retracing her sibling’s footsteps on an around
the world trip in order to understand why she was driven to suicide. With Mia’s
tragic death at the centre of the novel, I was very anxious to unravel the
mystery step by step, just as Katie had planned to do.
Where the novel didn’t work for me was in its narrative style.
There was a lot of telling rather than showing, and the lengthy explanations of
past events and relationships stalled the story, especially in the first half
of the book. This created a barrier between the reader and the characters which
I found difficult to transcend. Perhaps giving Mia a voice in first-person
narrative would have lent it more emotional depth and provided the opportunity
for flashbacks rather than long-winded explanations. This was especially true
for the scene where Mia meets Mick – a crucial point in the story, which never
quite reached its full potential. I also felt that certain details should have
been withheld in order to create a mystery and keep me interested, to be
resolved and brought together at a later stage.
Without emotional connection to the characters, I felt oddly
adrift in my reading experience, not being able to understand some characters’
more bizarre decisions and relationships – which I will not go into here because I don’t want to
give away any spoilers. The second half of the book worked much better for me,
and I felt that the author was finally allowing the characters to break free of
their bonds and develop their personalities through actions and dialogue rather
than an observer’s narrative. In the later part, the author seems to have found
her voice and lets emotions show without filtering them through passionless
explanations of a third person viewpoint – I found myself getting slowly drawn
into Katie’s quest and even had a tear in my eye at one point.
What I loved about the novel were the moments where the
author’s passion surrounding travel and the ocean clearly shone through and
there was a strong emotional undertone – especially in the scenes around
swimming and surfing. With Swimming at Night being Clarke’s debut novel, there
is a lot of room for connecting with her own voice in future novels – and since
the idea behind the plot is solid and creative, I look forward to seeing what
the author has in store for us next time around.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me
with an electronic preview copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.
The opinions expressed here are strictly my own.
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