Customer Reviews

Swimming with Jonah

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Ms. Schulman's first novel was titled The Cage, which referred to an on the ground, polar bear version of a shark watching cage. In Swimming With Jonah we encounter an underperforming, introverted woman student whose efforts to get in medical school have all but failed. Finally a school on an island in the South Pacific that has been set up just for students who cannot gain admission anywhere else accepts her. This hot, humid island becomes her cage.

While it may be viewed in one sense that our heroine comes out of her shell while attending this demanding school, it also seems that her mental faculties are losing their moorings. It wouldn't seem that having you mind drift off into a surreal world would be symptomatic of good mental health.

In both novels Ms. Schulman creates groups of characters that are all flawed in some way. A reader might often wish that he/she could meet some of the characters met in novels. After reading an AS novel you are likely to say, "Thank God none of those people are my next door neighbors.

Be that as it may the novel is very interesting, and very well written. I do like Ms. Schulman's writing style and eagerly await her next book.

I checked this book out one summer while on break and working on campus at the University of Denver. I cannot even really explain how it affected me. It is more of a feeling than anything else - I like how Schulman's books make me FEEL when I read them. Since reading Swimming for the first time, I have read The Cage and A House Named Brazil and now own all three. I can only hope to read more of what she has written. This story will touch you in a place you have long forgotten. You will remember your body and your relationships and re-invent them the way that Jane does in the book - Bravo!

Vivid setting, excellent non-stock characterization, a compelling and bizarre situation, unexpected moments. As she did with The Cage, Schulman surprises convincingly. I loved how her protagonist changed and grew. It's one of those infrequent miracles of fiction that the heroine becomes more sympathetic and interesting when we read something which should make us dislike her but which instead gives us hope for her future. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.

I enjoyed this as much as THE CAGE, which I loved. Part of the author's gift in storytelling is showing so much with action, requiring so little in dialogue. The people are vivid. The story became more interesting once Jane reached Indonesia and a lot more interesting once we learned the truth about her failing to get into an American medical school. I wish I knew what happened to her next.

"She looked to Krakow slow?" What is this, with all the maddening adjectives strewn into sentences where adverbs should be? It doesn't sound poetic, just clunky as all get out and distracting to anyone who cares about clean, unaffected writing. The school and the island could have been so much more sharply drawn, and Jane Guy remains a pitiful victim from start to end. Is the reader supposed to feel sorry for her, given the unsubtly awful parents? It's hard not to feel repugnance instead.

No complexity of character anywhere, a plot that plods toward a grim conclusion and always those missing "ly"s to render the book semi-literate: this was a disappointment.

Jane Guy starts out as a pathetic character that you don't really care about and ends up a slightly different pathetic character that you still don't care about. The story was so beige. There was not enough detail about the surroundings and happenings. None of the characters ever develop much and I felt I only knew them on the surface. I never got to see why they were the way they were. I actually had a love/hate relationship with the author's use of "slow" instead of "slowly" to emphasis just how agonizingly slow things are on most islands and island nations. Each time I saw the improper use, it made me pause and helped me get the feel of just how frustrating a simple thing like slowing things down can be. This could have been a really good story if it were developed much further.

I read this book because somebody recommended it, but even though it was written pretty well and there's an interesting setting and some cool characters, the main character, Jane, drove me crazy. She's being victimzed by everybody, like her parents, a manipulative roomate, this sadistic boyfriend, her teachers, and she just sort of takes it and hardly does anything to fight it, and then in the end she runs away. (Who wouldn't?) But where's this big change they talk about on the book jacket? I can't relate to a character who's so passive about really important things that effect her whole life.

Audrey Schulman's recent novel Swimming with Jonah is that rare combination of thoughtful characterization and forceful narrative that kept me turning the pages late into the night. Schulman's prose is clear, economical, subtle, and vigorous. She's a great storyteller. We follow the narrator, a young woman attempting to survive a last-chance medical school in Indonesia, as she struggles for identity and independance. I read the second half of the book on a plane, and was actually happy when a delay was announced--because I could finish this book. Schulman is a find. Highly recommended.

I should hate Audrey Schulman because this book was so engrossing that I lost track of time and burned my dinner. Instead, I was mad at the burning dinner for interrupting my reading.

This fascinating book took me on a harrowing and sometimes disturbing journey. I enjoyed watching Jane Guy--a brow-beaten, self-conscious girl who is overly eager to please--survive her challenges and grow into a self-confident woman capable of determining her own future.

I've been recommending it to all my friends, and they've had equally positive reactions. Several said they were still thinking about this book days after they finished reading it.

I just finished this book and am fairly disappointed. Thank God I got it at the library instead of buying it. It started interestingly enough with the story of how Jane's father became a man, but Jane's own metamorphosis slowly (or should I say "slow") bogs down. The characters seem flat and trapped in endless medical jargon. By the end, the book only succeeded in putting me in as much of a trance as Jane. The reviews on the cover described the end as "chilling" and "shocking," but it was more just an unsurprising, unsatisfying resolution of a mediocre plot.

I agree the descriptions were quite intensive, but they were usually tangents off the story that lead nowhere. I noted that some people found Jane interesting because she was an overweight, passive girl who turns into a thin, passive woman. It's nice to see weight loss used as a transitional element in the story. *sighs* I think a much, much better take on the same themes can be found in Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower.