A Single Breath by Lucy Clarke

During last week's miserable reading slump, I picked up A Single Breath by Lucy Clarke, a book that had just arrived from Touchstone and which was originally sent to me unsolicited (but did not arrive - a second copy then arrived at the wrong house at my request, so who knows . . . a dog might have dragged off the first to use as a toy; they do that in our old neighborhood).

A Single Breath is about Eva, a midwife who has been married to Jackson for a mere 8 months when Jackson is swept off an outcropping of rocks while fishing on the English coast. Deeply grieved, Eva decides to take some time off from her job in London and travel to Tasmania to meet Jackson's father and his estranged brother, Saul.  But, things don't go as expected. Jackson father Dirk is not welcoming and Saul is still angry about an incident that happened several years ago.

However, events conspire to keep Eva in Tasmania longer than expected and she ends up staying in a shack just down the bay from where Saul lives. As she gets to know Saul, the truth about Jackson slowly emerges and Eva realizes she really didn't know the man she married at all. Why did Jackson leave Tasmania? Did he really love Eva? Is he truly dead?

There are bits of writing by Jackson interspersed throughout and those both confuse the reader and add mystery to the story. If he's able to write, isn't he really alive?  Or are those little bits something that Jackson wrote before his untimely death in a letter that Eva will later discover?

There's a lot I think I shouldn't mention about A Single Breath because it's best to enjoy the slow reveal but I can tell you that I felt like this as I was reading:

Sucked into the mystery of what became of Jackson in A SINGLE BREATH by Lucy Clarke. Washed into the sea or not? Dying to know. #fridayreads
— Bookfoolery (@Bookfoolery) April 18, 2014

And, I loved the way Eva gradually got to know Saul as she stayed near him on an island off the coast of Tasmania, loved the way he taught her how to "free dive", checked on her when she was ill, even eventually brought her along to work.  Saul and Eva are likable characters. I did feel as if the story dragged on a little bit longer than necessary and what I expected occurred, all-around, but I enjoyed the reading and am grateful to Lucy Clarke for yanking me out of my book slump with A Single Breath.

Recommended - I particularly loved the characters, the setting, and the tug of mystery.  There were some repetitive tense-change errors and I did find the story predictable in many ways but none of the book's flaws were significant enough to spoil the reading. Love, love, love the setting. Reading A Single Breath will definitely make you want to hop a plane to Tasmania.

©2014 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery  or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

Swimming at Night by Lucy Clarke

Swimming at Night by Lucy Clarke
Copyright 2013
Touchstone Books (an imprint of Simon & Schuster) - fiction/general
372 pp.

I'm going to go uber-casual on this one and say up-front that it's a book about sisters . . . which I usually hate.  I've never had a great relationship with my sister (her choice).  We get along fine but the word "close" is just not happening.  However, my dud sister relationship really didn't bother me much in this case because I was totally sucked into the story pretty quickly.

Swimming at Night is told from alternating viewpoints.  As the book opens, Katie is receiving news that her sister Mia has committed suicide in Bali.  Mia's been touring the world with her good friend Finn for several months, but Bali wasn't on her agenda and Finn was no longer with Mia when she died. What happened on Mia's trip? Why was she in Bali and what led to her death?

Katie is convinced that Mia could not possibly have killed herself.  When she's given Mia's backpack, which contains her journal, Katie quits her job and follow's Mia's path, reading the entries as she follows in Mia's footsteps.  She never reads ahead, which was the one thing I couldn't buy into about Swimming at Night.  Your sister dies of a suspected suicide, you've got her journal and -- seriously? -- you don't sit right down and read it cover to cover to try to figure out what on earth happened?  I can't fathom not reading the journal immediately; that's the first thing I'd do.

Beyond that oddity, though, Swimming at Night is a story of betrayal and lies, love and friendship, facing fears and grief and learning what's important in life.  There's quite a bit of s*x but not the graphic variety. Although there were moments that I was pulled from the book due to a relationship that I couldn't relate to and the odd choice not to read ahead in the journal, I found Swimming at Night quite gripping and the ending perfect. The chapters alternate between Katie's viewpoint and Mia's, as events unfolded on Mia's journey.  I thought that the alternating chapters worked very well and the story was handled skillfully.

Highly recommended - Yeah, the ploy of having the main character choose not to immediately read her sister's journal to keep events mysterious is a bit of a stretch, but Swimming at Night is a good story that will make you want to grab a backpack and go explore the world.  The writing style is above average -- not brilliant and quote-worthy, but there's just something about the way the book unfolds that makes the pages fly.  I gave Swimming at Night a 4.5/5 at Goodreads because it grabbed me, held on and had a satisfying ending.  Love, love, love the changing settings.

My thanks to Jessica at Simon & Schuster for the review copy!

In other news -- and this is very important:

I got a new pair of flip-flops, today (Tuesday - yeah, I'm pre-posting, again).  They're white.  Kind of boring, actually, but they were cheap and had the kind of fabric thingy-that-goes-between-the-toes, which is crucial because everything else causes blisters.  Anyway, that's a relief, since we've already crept into the 80s and I discovered our new pebble-dash sidewalk and driveway are Really Freaking Painful to walk across barefoot.  And, I keep stepping on sweetgum balls on the deck.  Actually, I finally picked those up, but seriously . . . you don't want to step on those suckers.

Currently reading:

Poison by Bridget Zinn - Scratch that.  I stayed up late finishing this one.
Shadows and Strongholds by Elizabeth Chadwick

Loving both, so far.

No idea, but it must have been interesting:

©2013 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery  or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.