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A woman must leave her island home to search for her missing sister-and confront the haunted history of her family.
Magdalena does not panic when she learns that her younger sister has disappeared. A free-spirit, Jadranka has always been prone to mysterious absences. But when weeks pass with no word, Magdalena leaves the isolated Croatian island where their family has always lived and sets off to New York to find her sister. Her search begins to unspool the dark history of their family, reaching back three generations to a country torn by war.
A haunting and sure-footed debut by an award-winning writer, The First Rule of Swimming explores the legacy of betrayal and loss in a place where beauty is fused inextricably with hardship, and where individuals are forced to make wrenching choices as they are swept up in the tides of history.
- Sales Rank: #1391219 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Little, Brown and Company
- Published on: 2013-05-28
- Released on: 2013-05-28
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.50" h x 1.25" w x 6.25" l, 1.19 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 336 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Luka, the patriarch of a family of fishermen living on the Croatian island of Rosmarina, taught everyone to swim, establishing a “first rule” with a profound implication—“Stay afloat.” A place of commanding beauty and painful memories in the wake of war and Communist oppression, Rosmarina calls to Luka even after he falls into a coma, though his daughter, Ana, flees the island in anger with her young daughters, Magdalena and Jadranka. As in her story collection, Stillness (2003), and memoir, The Stone Fields (2004), Whiting Award winner Brkic draws on her Croatian heritage and Bosnian war experiences in her sinuous and suspenseful first novel as she tracks the paths of solitary teacher Magdalena, who becomes firmly anchored to Rosmarina, and elusive artist Jadranka, who, with her shimmering, red-haired beauty, resembles no one else in the family and changes everyone’s lives by going to New York City and clandestinely searching for their missing uncle. In her exquisitely crafted, superbly structured novel, Brkic summons undertones of Greek tragedy to create her arresting characters and their intense emotions and dire secrets. By dramatizing nuanced questions of who is at fault, who can be trusted, and who will sink or swim, Brkic reveals persistent, multigenerational wounds of war, sacrifice, exile, and longing and imagines how healing might commence. --Donna Seaman
Review
"With empathy and poetic grace....Layers of the family's history slip away and truth---involving betrayal, thwarted love, and ultimately reconciliation---is shiningly revealed....The First Rule of Swimming examines lives bruised and twisted by history, like weather-beaten trees that nevertheless manage to produce the sweetest fruit."
---Brooke Allen, New York Times Book Review
"Suspenseful....Brkic traces three generations of family history, revealing the wounds of war, exile, and betrayal. The revelations are well paced, and Brkic deftly walks the line between the sentimental and the intimate. The novel draws its narrative force from the characters' desire to protect family and to survive at all costs."
---The New Yorker
"In her exquisitely crafted, superbly structured novel, Brkic summons undertones of Greek tragedy to create her arresting characters and their intense emotions and dire secrets. By dramatizing nuanced questions of who is at fault, who can be trusted, and who will sink or swim, Brkic reveals persistent, multigenerational wounds of war, sacrifice, exile, and longing and imagines how healing might commence."
---Donna Seaman, Booklist [starred review]
"A sensitive tale of deep emotional force."
---Kirkus
"This compact, beautiful novel of two island sisters deftly explores what it is to love a place, a person, and the lengths to which one will go to defend them. Brkic is adept at depicting both the timeless paradise of the island, Rosmarina, and the way its brutal history has scarred a family for generations."
---Janet Fitch, author of Paint It Black and White Oleander
"Courtney Angela Brkic seamlessly negotiates past and present, silence and secrets, to reveal one family's enduring love-as profound and as perilous as the sea surrounding their island home. With beautiful images and characters that are vividly real, The First Rule of Swimming is a delicately written work of art, about history and memories and the grief at their fading and loss."
---Daphne Kalotay, author of Russian Winter and Sight Reading
"Between the dazzling light of an Adriatic island and the gritty streets of New York City, an intriguing world of possibilities - past, present and future - arises. Part-mystery and part-family saga, The First Rule of Swimming explores the variety of ways in which the physical and psychological landscape of a place can be altered forever by politics and immigration."
---Valerie Martin, author of The Confessions of Edward Day and Property
"Think of your most cherished memory. Now think of your saddest memory. What if the two were so connected to each other that one couldn't exist without the other? You'd have to find a way to forge forward, containing the pain and beauty, both. And you'd find a way. Because you must. And Courtney Angela Brkic's tender and tough novel The First Rule of Swimming could be your guide. In which case, you'd be in the best of hands."
---Joshua Furst, author of The Sabotage Café and Short People
"Brkic is a shimmering talent. She writes with precision and power about three generations of a family caught in a cycle of war, sacrifice, love, and loyalty. Brkic's portrayal of the family's brutal, mysterious transformation is held in perfect tension, and tenderly told in language that is as fluid and crystal-clear as the island seascape around which the story revolves. The thing that perhaps stays most with me about this book is its heart: vulnerable, resilient, generous."
---Mei Ng, author of Eating Chinese Food Naked
About the Author
Courtney Angela Brkic is the author of Stillness: And Other Stories--named a 2003 Best Book by the Chicago Tribune, a Notable Book by the New York Times, and a Barnes & Noble Discover pick. Her memoir The Stone Fields was shortlisted for the Freedom of Expression Award by the Index on Censorship. Brkic has been the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches in the MFA program at George Mason University, and lives in New York City.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
You can hear the courage people had by way author wrote. Helps to compare today to 1942 how people came legally.
By Joyce A. Glowacki
Written about time when people were having to leave their countries, I order to live. Young or old to pack very little to go to America not able
To speak English. Many did not know anyone a must to learn English work very hard for next to nothing make a living. Heartbreaking because
They could not word back to family.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Very good, picked up without knowing a thing
By Blue moon
Very good, picked up without knowing a thing, by cover I thought would be an easy breezy book, was stunned I was reading a real book!
20 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
A Beautiful Tale of a Family
By Maxine McLister
"The first rule of swimming...is to stay afloat"
In this beautiful novel, Luka explained this, first to his son and daughter and then his granddaughters, as he teaches them to swim - an extremely important lesson when you live on an island but just as important as you make your way in life. The island is Rosmarina in Croatia, a country torn apart, first by a brutal Communist regime and, after the fall of Communism, by an equally brutal civil war. Luka's family has been effected by both, forcing them to live with secrets which are destroying them. Some have been forced to flee to the United States to avoid imprisonment; his daughter has moved to the mainland to escape her past; and now it is his granddaughters who are being forced to bear the burden.
Jadranka, the youngest, has always been a free spirit, artistic and beautiful. She often disappears for long periods of time but never before without telling her sister, Magdalena. But when she disappears in New York, Magdalena does what she once thought impossible, she leaves her beloved island to find her sister. As she searches for her sister, many of the old secrets start to unravel and much of what she thought she knew about her family has been wrong. If she is to stay afloat, she must be willing to follow the path she is on and accept the truth no matter where it takes her.
I will admit here, that my first reason for requesting this book on Netgalley was the cover -something this lovely just begs to be read. But, the more I read, the more engrossed I became in the lives and secrets of this family. This a beautiful and compelling tale of a family divided by secrets and by time and place. These are complex characters with motives which are not always apparent. Finally, though, it is not the end of Communism or the war or even the truth which will set the family free but the love that is still there beneath the surface. But perhaps the most intriguing character of all in this tale is not the family but the island - I don't know if it actually exists or it is an invention of the author. I suppose I could look it up on Google maps or any Atlas but some places like Rosmarina just belong in the imagination.
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