Skip to content
Responsive image
Vendor
Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Weblink
rachelbeanland.com/book/

FLORENCE ADLER SWIMS FOREVER

Rachel Beanland

This novel is a beautifully written debut story about the fragile ties that keep family together and our need to find love and atonement after a great loss.
It's the summer of 1934 and Florence Adler has returned home to Atlantic City from college, intent on swimming the English Channel by summer's end. When she drowns, while out on a training swim, she leaves behind seven family members and friends who must navigate her loss over the course of the summerand beyond.

Told from rotating points of view, the novel features a diverse cast of richly drawn and unforgettable characters. There is Florence's older sister, Fannie, who is pregnant again after recently losing a baby. She's on bed rest at Atlantic City Hospital while her seven-year-old daughter, Gussie, and her husband, Isaac, make do without her. There are Fannie and Florence's parents, Esther and Joseph, who have built Adler's Bakery from the ground up and who thought, until now, that they had realized the American dream. Anna is a young woman, almost exactly Florence's age, who Joseph recently helped emigrate from Nazi Germany. And there's Stuart who is a lifeguard with the Atlantic City Beach Patrol and heir to a Boardwalk hotel that doesn't serve Jewish guests.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, Esther decides that the family must keep the news of Florence's death a secret - at least until Fannie has delivered a healthy baby. This decision and its resulting tensions, becomes the backdrop against which other family secrets are slowly revealed. The novel examines the secrets we keep for the benefit of others and whether we have the right to decide what people get to know about their own lives.

It's a big-hearted family saga that examines our tendency to keep secrets from the people we most love. The novel offers a trenchant and often humorous look at the dysfunctional relationships inherent to every family. It is both a bit of a page-turner with the second half unfolding into a love story that is both captivating and surprising, and ultimately, uplifting.

Florence Adler Swims Forever is based on a true story that took place in Rachel's family more than eighty years ago, a correspondence that she addresses in her Author's Note at the end of the book.
Available products
Book

Published 2020-07-07 by Simon & Schuster

Book

Published 2020-07-07 by Simon & Schuster

Comments

I started reading FLORENCE ADLER SWIMS FOREVER and did not stop until its final words. Rachel Beanland so completely transports readers to the summer of 1934 in Atlantic City and a tragedy that changes the lives of one family there that I expected to smell salt air and see ocean waves crashing when I looked up again. What a bighearted novel this is. What a glorious debut.

Beanland beautifully handles the depiction of loss and rebuilding life without a loved one, describing moments that are by turns painful and moving.

Rachel Beanland is a writer of uncommon wit and wisdom, with a sharp and empathetic eye for character. She'll win you over in the most old fashioned of ways: She simply tells a hell of a story.

Grief may propel this story, but the overall effect is one of joy - especially at watching such an assured and dazzling debut writer at work. The Adlers are as real as your closest friends, and their tale of perseverance couldn't be more timely. From its unforgettable opening and through the rippling current of her characters' lives, Beanland shows a warmth and humanity that will bring readers back again and again.

A perfect summer read... In less than ten pages, I became a mere subject of the audience, allowing Beanland's storytelling ability to overpower me, rather than taking the story in consciously and internally commenting... What's remarkable is not how quickly the book hooked me, but how it held my attention during and after reading. After spending a pleasant afternoon flying through the first 96 pages, I woke up at 3 a.m. thinking about the plot. I simply couldn't put it out of my head. I finished in two days... I felt awe.

FLORENCE ADLER SWIMS FOREVER is a riveting page-turner about characters who know how to keep a fierce secret, even when it is nearly impossible to do so.

The best fiction elucidates a time, place, and people. This is it. Right here. With precise, beautiful prose and spot-on dialogue, Rachel Beanland's debut novel, FLORENCE ADLER SWIMS FOREVER, is a flawless work of fiction that captures a flawed but big-hearted Jewish family navigating Atlantic City during the Great Depression. This beachside New Jersey town is as vivid a character as the family inhabiting it and even the most damaged characters contain glimmers of hope.

Readers of Emma Straub and Curtis Sittenfeld will devour this richly drawn debut family saga based on the story of an ancestor of the author's.

[Florence Adler Swims Forever] is a tender, funny, frank look at how family and faith can frustrate us, sustain us, and keep us human.

Beanland's novel draws the reader in. The situation she describes is poignant and the characters she develops win us over with their private grief. Beanland is particularly good at conjuring 1930s Atlantic City, with its small family-owned hotels yielding to larger, more commercial palaces. The historical moment is fraught as American Jews try to save relatives in an increasingly untenable Nazi Germany. We see cruel obstacles to immigration, and the growing chasm between European Jews and their increasingly prosperous American counterparts. This is a book about the American dream. The dream is not without costs, and the dreamers are not immune to tragedy.

Rachel Beanland has written a wonderfully assured and completely engrossing first novel. From the very first page, I was completely invested in the lives of Florence, Gussie, Anna and the rest. FLORENCE ADLER SWIMS FOREVER has much to say about family, loss and all the ways we have to wonder what might have been, and it does so with great skill and a deeply humane vision. I could not recommend it more highly.

Beanland deftly weaves various historical events and themes: the rise of the Nazi regime, family secrets, the struggle between classes, religious tensions, sexuality, and familial love. Yet it works, and this novel is as close to unputdownable as they come. Based on a true story - beautifully described in the Author's Note - Florence Adler Swims Forever is a memorable debut.

UK: S&S UK ; Bulgarian: KRYG/Book Trend ; French: Lattes ; Lithuanian: Baltos Lankos ; Russian: Eksmo