The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

Grand Central Publishing, 2008. First edition. First edition [stated]. First printing [stated]. Hardcover. Good in very good dust jacket. Signed by author. Minor page discoloration. Rear board somewhat weak at hinge, reinforced with a bit of glue.. [8], 311, [1] p. Laurel Gray Hawthorne needs to make things pretty, whether she's helping her mother make sure the family skeleton stays in the closet or turning scraps of fabric into nationally acclaimed art quilts. While Laurel's life seems neatly on track, everything she holds dear is suddenly thrown into question. Laurel Gray Hawthorne hasn't seen a ghost in the thirteen years she and her husband have lived in the beautiful gated neighborhood of Victorianna...But in the dog days of a Florida August, she wakes to find a dead girl standing by her bed. It's the ghost of her daughter's best friend, Molly, who leads the way to her own small body floating lifelessly in the Hawthorne's backyard pool. Now, with polce on her lawn asnd neighbors peeking over the fence, Laurel's carefully constructed existence cracks and her past seeps through." From the Good Reads website: "Joshilyn Jackson was born by the sugar white beaches of Florida s Redneck Riviera and raised by a tribe of wild fundamentalists who taught her to be virtuous and upright. Unfortunately, it didn t take, and Ms. Jackson dropped out of college to pursue a career as an actor. She worked in regional repertoire, wrote plays, and traveled the southern third of the country with a dinner theatre troupe. She decided both virtue and an education were worth the work, so she went back to college to study English literature, focusing on Modern and Medieval Theater. She graduated with honors from Georgia State. She fell for the hometown guy who d been her best friend since she was a teenager and followed him north, braving Chicago s winters to marry him. She recovered from a near-terminal case of culture shock in time to earn her MA in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Jackson spent seven years in as a southern ex-pat in Illinois, working with various theatre groups as an actor and playwright and selling short fiction to literary magazines and anthologies such as Calyx and TriQuarterly. She also taught English at UIC, trying to explain the function of the gerund and why Waiting for Godot is a great play to crowds of hung-over 18 year olds. In her first year of teaching, she won the Student s Choice Award for Best English Instructor. Motherhood made her homesick, and in 1998 she moved back to the South to teach part time, raise kids full time, and try her hand at writing novels in her copious spare time (read: every day from 4 am til the baby woke up. ) She s been a full time novelist since gods in Alabama sold at auction in 2005, but Jackson s teaching experience and theatre background have both come in handy. She enjoys reading the audio versions of her novels, and she s been on faculty of writing workshops all over the country and enjoys speaking at book festivals, libraries and literary events. She occasionally teaches a creative writing class, most recently at Vermont College of Fine Arts and Emory University. She currently lives outside of Atlanta with her husband Scott and their two kids, Sam and Maisy Jane. They share space with Bagel the hound dog, Ansley the small auxiliary dog, Boggart Cat, and a twenty-three-pound, one-eyed Maine Coon cat named Franz Schubert. Their outsize aquarium has, over the years, hosted a pair of brother gerbils who turned out to be an incestuous brother-sister baby factory, tadpoles who turned out to be mosquito larvae, more tadpoles who turned out to be newt larvae, caterpillars who turned out to be verminous hairy tent worms, and an egg sack that recently hatched out several zillion cannibalizing mantises who are now living in the back garden. This crew is often supplemented by stray beasts of all stripes seeking permanent homes."