The title to Sara J. Henry’s debut novel Learning to Swim contains a clue about Troy, her main character and the predicament(s) in which she finds herself. Compassionate human instinct compels her, in the book’s opening chapter, to leap from the deck of a ferry to rescue a child she saw falling from a boat going in the opposite direction. Without thinking, she puts herself at risk for a stranger in peril, but once in the water, instinct has to be put aside and training has got to be relied on. Training is an incremental suppression of natural instinct that allows you to accomplish feats of practical insanity (holding the line in a gun battle, performing simple tasks while vacuum-packed into space suit outside the earth’s atmosphere, jogging), and Troy’s triathlon conditioning helps her a great deal when she finds herself submerged in very cold waters, a long way from shore with an extra fifty pounds strapped to her back. Troy’s instinct compelled her to do the right thing, but it was training that saved her life.
Once ashore, once the immediate danger has passed and her training has retired for the evening, instinct, feeling cocky perhaps, makes another risky call. When Troy realizes that no one has noticed them, no one is waiting for them at the banks of Lake Champlain, and that no one is looking for the child. She decides to keep him.
Troubling thoughts begin to occur to her over the course of the evening. Why is no one frantically calling out for the young boy? Why has no one gone to the police? And probably most compelling, why did she find him immobilized by design, arms bound and rendered useless by clothing tied tightly around him in the water? It was no accident. Someone was trying to kill the boy and make him disappear.
The boy is traumatized and reluctant to or incapable of explaining his circumstances to Troy, but over the course of a few days, begins to divulge his secrets. In French. For Troy the surge of motherly protection she feels for him is instinctual, but her training and practical experience are limited to a rotating cast of younger men, athletes like herself, whom she platonically cohabitates with and inevitably slips into the role of den mother for. And getting to the bottom of the kid’s situation, puts her way, waaaaay out of her depth. God bless her, though, she’s going to try. The dark waters she literally jumped in to prove to be far less dangerous than the metaphorical ones involving kidnapping and murder that she is ahem Learning to Swim.
A compelling set up is important, but the real pleasure of Henry’s book is the constant surprise of the character. It’s an increasingly rare experience not to see every turn of plot and logic coming around the page, and the ability to sell the reader on the character’s logic without shortchanging them on surprise is no small feat. Sara J. Henry pulled it off.
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
