Swimming Sweet Arrow : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Candid, loving and daring...
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A Coming of Age Story?
Review: When I finished reading this book I really didn't know what to think of it. While reading it I constantly felt like I was reading a trashy romance novel with all the explicitly sexual imagery and at other times I found myself wondering if the plot was going to go anywhere at all. The book is described as being a coming of age story of two best friends, but I think it is just a teenage pornographic novel. I probably won't read this book again and even though it was only two hundred pages long, I feel that my time was wasted on this unsatisfying book.