title: To Be Sung Underwater
author: Tom McNeal
source: sent for review from Blue Dot Literary
pages: 436
published: 2011
first line: The man sits hidden among pines on a bluff overlooking the grid farms and country roads lying north.
rated: 5 out of 5 stars
What a great find To Be Sung Underwater has turned out to be.
With it's wonderful writing, moving storyline and dynamic characters, this was one of those books that I lost myself in for a few days.
One summer, while living in Nebraska with her father, Judith Toomey met and fell in love with a carpenter named Willy Blunt.
When she left for college, she promised him she would return and marry him.
Instead, Judith wound up meeting and marrying a banker named Malcom and has a daughter named Camille. She never returned to her lost love in Nebraska.
Now twenty seven years later, Judith has never forgotten Willy. Memories of him intertwine with her everyday life. For a while, she'd call his house then hang up when his mother answered. She still keeps his photo in her wallet.
The story flashes back from the summer when Judith was in love with Willy and living in Nebraska, to her current day life as a film editor.
In her current life, Judith has good reason to believe that her husband Malcom is cheating on her. She wonders if she herself has fallen out of love with him.
Judith came from a broken home, her parents having divorced when she was a teen. I liked reading the flashbacks of Judith and her father. He would read her Pride & Prejudice and Judith would ask him if she would ever be like Elizabeth Bennett. Judith decided to stay with her father permanently as the two had a close bond.
Reading about Judith and Willy made me think those two were meant to be together.
Their love story just drew me in. Their first date is the simple and romantic kind that just makes the reader sigh. The Nebraska setting for their summer love was perfect and I could easily envision the sights and sounds during their private rendezvous in the Adirondack-like mountains.
She closed her eyes. He said nothing. Neither did she. She just lay feeling the sun touching her and listening to the slow, strangely vivid creak of the dock, the watery rocking of the kayak, the occasional cry of a bird, and she wondered what it meant that stripping her life down to as little as this could afford more contentment than anything more complicated ever would.
p.384
I found Judith's current life to be a sad one. She rents out a storage unit for her childhood furniture and recreates her teenage bedroom in Nebraska. Judith hires a private detective to find Willy. I did wonder why would Judith remain in this unhappy marriage, but she was one of the complex characters within this story and as I read I hoped for her happy ending.
These, then, were the beginnings of what Judith later thought of as the Summer of Willy Blunt. All at once her life of latency and quiescence had turned metaphoric.
p.239
I loved this novel. To Be Sung Underwater will be on my top reads for 2011. This is the kind of story that begs to be discussed and one that you reflect on long after the last page is turned.
I think this book would make for a great movie as well. There is romance, heartache and drama weaved within the story and I found it hard to put down.
Another thing I like about this book is the cover. Isn't it serene looking? It fits the story perfectly.
To Be Sung Underwater was a wonderful read from cover to cover and I highly recommend it if you are looking for a good book to get lost in.
The days slid by, Judith and Willy fell into the lazy rhythm of their secret life, carried along by the presumption that all the foreseeable tomorrows would be more or less like the day before them.
p.273
Special thanks to Blue Dot Literary for sending me a copy.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tom McNeal is a critically-acclaimed author of many short stories and the novel, Goodnight, Nebraska; for which he won the 1999 James A. Michener Memorial Prize. McNeal was born in Santa Ana, California, where his father and grandfather raised oranges. He spent part of every summer at the Nebraska farm where his mother was born and raised, and after earning a BA in English at UC Berkeley and an MFA in Creative Writing at UC Irvine, he taught school in the town that was the inspiration for Goodnight, Nebraska. Tom has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, and his short stories have been widely anthologized.
