Swimming Sweet Arrow

What first attracted me to this book was the picture on the cover and the fact that is was a first novel for Maureen Gibbon. From the very first words I read I knew I was going to enjoy this book. The heroine, Vangie Raybuck tells a candid tale of her life starting in high school with her boyfriend Del and her very best friend June and her boyfriend Ray. All the emotional, excitable trials and tribulations of two young women growing up in a working class life style are translated through their multiple sexual encounters. The language is raw, honest, simple yet very meaningful.Vangie's daring, caring, loving voice defines her love, her sexual behaviour, her frienships and her jobs with such passion and candor that I could not help loving her. Her story involving drugs, drinking, sex, violence and religion is so moving, it touched me in such an unexpected way that I will never forget this beautiful novel.When Vangie states ; ''Here is what they never tell you about being a girl'', it made me think of my own youth and all we had to learn through experience. Even though the sexual details are very explicit, Maureen Gibbon's writing is sharp, expressive, bold even risqué, it is never cheap.I loved this book and highly recommend it.

I thought this book was amazing. Once I started reading, I couldn't put it down. It's one of the few honest books I've ever read about what it's like to grow up female, and it's one of the few honest books about sex. I could relate to Vangie and her friend June -- to their dilemmas, their feelings and their experiences. The book is shocking in places, but that's because there's so much truth in it. It makes me think of those photos by Walker Evans in LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN. Gibbon doesn't turn away from the un-beautiful, and the result is a book that is strong and haunting.

I read this novel straigh through. The pacing is so strong that it pulls you in. I couldn't stop reading--mainly, because the narrator, Vangie, speaks so directly, honestly. At times her voice felt searing, unmodulated, something like reading a journal. In some other hands, the recklessness of Vangie, her working-class, small town situation, more typically would receive irony, condescension. Swimming Sweet Arrow demands you to approach Vangie's life on her terms. In a way, like Zola, but with optimism. This book is unlike anything I've ever read.