The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - Joshilyn Jackson
Atlanta Author's Southern Mystery Novel
Mar 2, 2008
In the novel The Girl Who Stopped Swimming based in the South, Laurel Gray Hawthorne sees people after they have passed away. Her uncle Marty has been haunting her since the tragic hunting accident she witnessed as a girl, and now a new girl has appeared outside of her window one hot August night. The girl turns out to be 13 year old neighbor Molly Dufresne, best friend of Laurel’s daughter Shelby. The drowning is cleared to be an accident, and the investigation concludes, but loose ends remain for the Hawthorne family.
Coming Apart at the Seams
Laurel, a highly acclaimed maker of high end art quilts, likes things neat and tidy. She and her husband David, computer game programmer, live in the gated community Victorianna in the Florida suburbs, where each house is picture perfect and no hedge is untrimmed. It seems like an ideal place to raise a family, until the accident.
Suddenly Laurel begins to question everything about her life. She interrogates her daughter, who says she had fallen asleep the night that Molly was found in the pool. Shelby’s cousin Bet Clemmens had been visiting when the accident occurred, and it soon begins to look like Molly and Bet may have somehow been involved in the accident. Bet, a distant cousin of Molly’s from DeLop, Laurel’s poverty stricken home town in Alabama.
The Past Returns
Laurel’s past begins to come out from the deep recesses where she had tidily tucked it away, out of sight and out of mind. She must come face to face with the only person who can help her: her sister Thalia, an actress with a personality as bold as Laurel’s is staid. Together they sort out the mystery, and repair their own broken relationship in the process.
About the Author
Joshilyn Jackson was born in the Deep South and studied English literature at Georgia State. She moved to Chicago and earned an MA in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Jackson’s short fictional works have been published in literary magazines and anthologies including TriQuarterly and Calyx, and her plays have been produced in Chicago and Atlanta. gods in Alabama, her best selling debut novel, won the SIBA 2005 Novel of the Year Award and was a #1 BookSense pick. Her novel Between, Georgia was also a #1 BookSense pick, making Jackson the first author in BookSense history to receive #1 status two years in a row. She lives outside of Atlanta with her husband, two children, a hound dog, and a one-eyed Maine Coon cat.
Jackson, Joshilyn
The Girl Who Stopped Swimming
New York, Grand Central Publishing, March 4, 2008
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