Most helpful customer reviews
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Sad tale of a family of strangers., April 11 2004
"Swimming Naked," the debut novel of Stacy Sims, is told through the eyes of Lucy Greene. The chapters alternate between Lucy's memories of events from her dysfunctional childhood and the present day, as Lucy attempts to comfort her dying mother, Fay. Lucy and her sister Anna have always been emotionally malnourished. They never felt close to their aloof, self-centered, and chain-smoking mother, and after their father has a serious accident, he is no longer there for them. Lucy and Anna have gone through life avoiding meaningful relationships. Lucy is promiscuous and uses wisecracks to avoid connecting with anyone emotionally. Anna is a wealthy housewife and agoraphobic who drowns her sorrows with alcohol. Only when their mother is on her deathbed do the sisters make an effort to stop the vicious circle of alienation that has made a shambles of their lives. Stacy Sims uses prose like a scalpel. She peels away the outer layers of the Greene family to reveal the loneliness underneath. Sims understands that, of all the bloody battlefields in the world, in some ways the home is the most brutal one of all. Close relatives have the ability to heal or destroy one another. Sometimes, family members do not even know the damage that they are causing until it is too late. For love-starved children, it is a challenge to accept the past and start fresh, to "swim naked" into the world and take the chance of loving and being loved, with all the risks that this entails. "Swimming Naked" is a touching and bittersweet novel that tells some painful truths about the rocky journey to adulthood.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A delight, April 6 2004
Anyone who has ever woken before dawn to pile in the car for a family vacation will be immediately drawn into this story. Anyone with a mother will appreciate the subdued, often silent, battles of will in this family. The details of a trip to the lake, the sunburn and the anger at the parents who forgot to put sunblock on her, allow the reader an intimate access into the world of Lucy, the main character. Sims juxtaposes past incidents durings Lucy's childhood with the present, where she has unwittingly become her mother's keeper. Sim's gift, though, is not only showing the differences in us as we age but those things that remain in us, as buried as they may be. Even when Lucy should have been naive, she wasn't, and when we expect her to be reserved, she isn't. The question of a freak accident versus a long, slow death forces the reader to ask whether it is ever possible to prepare for some things and whether there is a right or wrong way to grieve.
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