Florence Adler Swims Forever by Rachel Beanland – 320 pages

ARC provided by Simon and Schuster and Netgalley for an honest review.

Book Blurb:

Every summer, Esther and Joseph Adler rent their house out to vacationers escaping to “America’s Playground” and move into the small apartment above their bakery. Now Florence has returned from college, determined to spend the summer training to swim the English Channel, and Fannie, pregnant again after recently losing a baby, is on bedrest for the duration of her pregnancy. After Joseph insists they take in a mysterious young woman whom he recently helped emigrate from Nazi Germany, the apartment is bursting at the seams. Esther only wants to keep her daughters close and safe but some matters are beyond her control: there’s Fannie’s risky pregnancy—not to mention her always-scheming husband, Isaac—and the fact that the handsome heir of a hotel notorious for its anti-Semitic policies, seems to be in love with Florence. When tragedy strikes, Esther makes the shocking decision to hide the truth—at least until Fannie’s baby is born—and pulls the family into an elaborate web of secret-keeping and lies, bringing long-buried tensions to the surface that reveal how quickly the act of protecting those we love can turn into betrayal.

My Review: 4 stars

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Florence Adler Swims Forever was a historical fiction gem that focuses on family, loss and love. As I started this review, the word “thoughtful” kept popping into my head. This book offered a sympathetic and sensitive look into family; I suppose that encompasses the word “thoughtful”.

The beginning starts with the loss of the Adler’s daughter Florence, a long-distance swimmer, who disappears during a training swim. I imagined the plot would be wrapped around the circumstances of her death and the reader would solving why she died. Was is drugs, suicide or something even more sinister? Turns out, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Really, this book does one thing; it gets inside of the heads of all who loved Florence and how they manage during the three months following her death.

Each character: mother, father, young niece, brother-in-law, potential boyfriend and a refugee from Nazi Germany, who was under the Adler’s care, dealt with this loss in entirely different ways. That’s not unusual at all; what is unusual was that the family keeps Florence’s death a secret from her older sister so she remains unaffected while pregnant and on bed rest. This causes so much additional distress on the family members, which simultaneously makes for good reading.

The book covers immigration, life-long secrets, lies, post-depression life, marriage, divorce, love, romance, anti-Semitism and grief. I loved the Atlantic City setting as I spent many weekend getaways there as a kid. It brought back a lot of memories. The author shares in her notes that this story is based on her great, great aunt’s life, who died at nineteen during an ocean swim and as happened in the story, the news of her death was withheld from her great, great grandmother until her baby was born. I’m so glad the author wrote and shared this story with the world. It’s personal, yet very relatable.