My Review of "Swimming With Wings" by Lee Libro

Blurb:

What do a 20th century light healer who can raise the dead, an eccentric, would-be dubutant teen and a wandering gypsy have in common? A story of human brotherhood released only through the colliding dogmas surrounding their shared tragedy from long ago.

Lark Jennison is a free thinker and imagines she has wings! Set in the 1970's in a small southern town laced with folk mysticism, faith healings and the evangelistic zeal of the era, Swimming with Wings is her coming of age story. Orphaned, seventeen-year-old Lark and her brother are the last generation of the illustrious Jennison lumber family, and her uncanny ability to read a person, along with her eccentric ways as a budding artist, shine a spotlight of scrutiny upon her. When she falls for Peter Roma, a river gypsy from Summerville, she finds in him an equal, but is soon disturbingly set on a collision course with his fanaticism.

The drowning accident that had killed their fathers remains a mystery, a harbinger of ill feelings between the Romas and the Jennisons.  Is Peter Roma, a scammer, a real gypsy or Lark's personal savior? To protect her, Lark's older brother sends her to art school in Maine, the home state of their mother's family. Uninvited, Peter follows but eventually considers their relationship a danger to their souls. His grandfather had been a mystical light healer and heralded the rising tide of a new age; however, Peter's "being saved" interpretation of this leads him into a cult and a world of corruption. Through it all, Lark and Peter remain in love, but in the end who will save who?

An arresting blend of literary fiction, mystery and romance, this is a story about searching for direction, the hidden influences of ancestral roots and the forces that shape belief.

My Review:

Swimming With Wings by Lee Libro is so much more than a coming of age novel.  It is a tale of love, family secrets, social stereotyping, etc.  It is rich in family histories and the mysteries that surround them.  It gives new meaning to the old adage about the sins of the father.  It is about grief and finding one’s way despite the loss.  I could go on and on.

Libro’s descriptions with use of alliteration and metaphor and similes are phenomenal creating an amazing portrayal of the protagonist, Lark’s mind, body and spirit along with the world around her and her interactions with it.  It is true literary fiction, and I easily got caught up in the language.

The exploration of spirituality is immense.  In fact, the quirkiness of the characters in the beginning when they are younger evolves gracefully into a great philosophical investigation into spirituality without preaching.   It is more of a laying out of the big questions, in a way that brought about a feeling of peace in this reader by the end.

I was thrilled with this tale, and can’t wait for more books to release by this author.

You can order this book at Amazon  and Barnes & Noble   

For more about the book and the author go to http://www.swimmingwithwings.com/