The Girl Who Stopped Swimming is Joshilyn Jackson's third novel. After finishing this one at breakneck speed, I'll be hunting down the first two.

Laurel has escaped her childhood and the family history in poverty stricken DeLop, Alabama. She's married to David, has a daughter Shelby and lives a comfortable life in a gated community. The ghosts have stopped following her. Until one night, when she sees the ghost of a young girl beckoning to her. She looks out the window and there is the dead girl - in her pool.

Although they disagree strongly on many, many things, she calls on her actress sister Thalia to come and help her deal with this. As the sisters 'investigate', the past comes charging up behind them. Secrets long buried won't be kept quiet any longer.

This is an absolute gem of a novel. Jackson's prose are captivating and unsettling at the same time.

"But her house did not feel normal. It was silent and too large around her, as if it had been hollowed out. The wrongness in her yard had it's nose pressed against her glass doors, and she felt something small and feral scrabbling in her belly. Every time she thought she'd lose herself in her work, the something would run one spiky tooth along her stomach lining."

The story is addicting. Can she really see ghosts? Hints of the past are eked out and I was reading as quickly as I could to piece it altogether. It's a mystery, but also a study in families and relationships and how the past affects the present.

In the reading group guide and notes, the author notes that "at it's heart, this book is about poverty". I found this quite interesting. As well as the literal translation of fiscal poverty, emotional poverty plays a key role.

This was a fantastic read for me.

Laurel Gray grew up in a poor neighbourhood with her parents and older sister Thalia. The Gray parents take the kids out of the neighbourhood but there are still family secrets and connections to the town, including what happened when Laurel's uncle was shot in a hunting accident. Laurel becomes pregnant during college after a single night with David and they get married, though there seem to be some lingering questions in Thalia's mind as to whether they belong together or not.

Laurel is woken in the middle of the night by a ghost beckoning her to her backyard. What she finds is her daughter (Shelby)'s best friend floating dead in the pool while a cousin from the poor neighbourhood is staying over. As questions are asked of Shelby and her cousin Bet, Laurel starts to question her past and the ghosts that haunt her. She struggles to keep her life together, keep her past from interrupting the present, and keep her husband and sister from killing each other.

Like Jackson's other novel I've read, Gods in Alabama, the plot sucks you in right away and you keep turning the pages until you're done. While I didn't find Gods in Alabama like this, I did find The Girl Who Stopped Swimming to be like a Jodi Picoult book where it's a family crisis and the characters and their personal problems are the premise of the book.

It's not the most believable book in the world, and I found some of the twists to be predictable, but that didn't take away from the entertainment value of the book, which was high! A great book!