Swimming Sweet Arrow

By Maureen Gibbon

Book Overview

Evangeline Starr Raybuck -- plain-spoken, lusty, and hardworking -- and June Keel are high school seniors, best friends going out with best friends, working together at Noecker's chicken farm after school. Vangie and June make out with their boyfriends together in the same car; they pass dirty notes to each other during the day at school. They tell each other everything: "That was the kind of friends we were".

After they graduate, things begin to shift. Vangie gets a job waitressing and moves in with Del; June, unable to get a job anywhere but the local factory, moves in with Ray and his older brother Luke. As they become more involved in their lives with their men, they see each other infrequently, but not so seldom that it doesn't become clear to Vangie that there's something dangerous going on, that June has crossed a line with the men in her life that even Vangie would not.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0316355569
• ISBN13: 9780316355568
• Release Date: August 2001
• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.57 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Candid, loving and daring...

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.

shocking and truthful

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.

A knockout

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.