Word: novelled
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...while also being deadpan hilarious. This is Keegan's debut, and she doesn't even hang out at the pool. ("I don't like chlorine," she says in a promotional video clip about the book. "It makes my eyes sting.") Nevertheless, she has written an ambitious and exhilarating novel about a girl for whom swimming is as vital as breathing...
...dreaded musical pressure in my chest as the flag slowly rises in a celebrating-the-dead kind of way. Something churns and my mind says: Wow! This is exactly like a giant funeral!") And for a world-class swimmer, she's not obsessed with swimming. Or rather, the novel isn't. Swimming really is like breathing for Pip--so integral to her life that it goes virtually unnarrated. What that means for readers is that we can relate to her; she may be amphibious to the outside world, but inside she's warm-blooded...
Keegan is smart about where she roots the suspense in her novel. Pip's Olympic quest may be ripped from Michael Phelps' headlines, but we don't have to sweat a photo finish. We know she'll get gold from the epigraph, a quote from her coach that's another deliciously ironic swipe at the double-edged sword of accomplishment: "If this exceptional athlete wore all the Olympic gold medals she has won in her long career and jumped find a pool, she would sink." What we find out is how much Pip's triumphs cost and how they change...
Born Everette Lynn Harris in Flint, Mich., he quit his job at IBM in his mid-30s and sold his first novel, Invisible Life, out of the trunk of his car to beauty salons and bookstores. A source of inspiration for black gay men, his once forbidden stories about their relationships caught on with female fans: for years, it was virtually impossible to ride the subway in New York City, Washington or Atlanta without coming across a black woman reading one of his novels...
...Obama: "I think the whole election was a novel." The book includes some interesting musings from the then President-elect, who spoke to the authors six weeks after his win. Despite the challenges facing a young, black, first-term Senator wishing to be President, Obama said the outcome didn't surprise him. An early indication that he might be electable nationwide, he said, was his strong Senate approval ratings even in Illinois' rural, white, culturally conservative regions. "If I'm in a big industrial state with 12% African-American population and people seem to not be concerned about...