Florence Adler Swims Forever

May 11, 2020
The shock of a family’s loss reverberates through Beanland’s debut. It’s 1934, and Florence Adler is a vivacious 20-year-old living in Atlantic City, N.J., preparing to swim the English Channel with the coaching help of Stuart Williams, a handsome local lifeguard. While at the beach with her niece, seven-year-old Gussie, and their young German Jewish houseguest, Anna Epstein, Florence sets off for a swim, during which she drowns. Her parents, Esther and Joseph, cannot bring themselves to tell Florence’s sister, Fannie, who’s pregnant and in the hospital on bed rest, and Gussie and Fannie’s husband, Isaac, must also keep the secret. The story progresses through the perspectives of those who had a connection to Florence, including Stuart, who harbored a crush on her; and Anna, with whom Florence shared a one-time sexual encounter; and a heady attraction that brews between Anna and Stuart after Florence’s death. Beanland beautifully handles the depiction of loss and rebuilding life without a loved one, describing moments that are by turns painful and moving (“Joseph’s daughter was to be found in the people who loved her the most”). The thick emotional tension will please fans of character-driven historicals.

June 1, 2020

DEBUT Florence, the 20-year-old daughter of Jewish bakery owners Esther and Joseph Adler, starts the summer of 1934 training for an upcoming trip to France to swim the English Channel. When Florence's life is cut short in tragedy, Esther and Joseph keep her death quiet from their eldest daughter, Fannie, who waits out a high-risk pregnancy in the hospital. Protecting the baby becomes paramount. While Fannie's husband, Isaac, swindles away funds in real estate schemes, their young daughter Gussie, unable to grasp the reason behind the lie, mourns the loss of her beloved aunt and misses her mother. Gussie finds comfort in Anna, a young German girl mysteriously living with the Adlers, and Stuart, Flossie's swim coach and admirer. Stuart, a handsome lifeguard and son of the elite Covington hotel owner, begins clandestine swimming lessons with Anna, growing closer as they also grieve for Florence. As the secrets threaten to spill and heartbreak blankets them, the family must unite to face a future without Florence. VERDICT Readers of Emma Straub and Curtis Sittenfeld will devour this richly drawn debut family saga based on the story of an ancestor of the author's.--Laura Jones, Indiana State Lib., Indianapolis

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2020
In a darkly comic debut, Beanland tells the story of a Jewish family on the New Jersey coast in 1934. It begins with tragedy: Florence Adler, while working toward her ambitious goal of becoming the first Jewish woman to swim the English Channel, drowns off the coast of Atlantic City. Shifting ambitiously among seven different third-person perspectives, the novel explores the aftermath of the tragedy as experienced by three generations of the Adler family and those adjacent to it. Florence's older sister, Fannie, is on bed rest as she prepares to give birth to her third child a year after having lost her second. The Adler family matriarch, Esther, decides it would be best to keep the tragedy from Fannie in order to minimize her risk of losing the baby. As the family fights against all odds to keep this huge secret, other issues are brought to light, from jealousy to hidden romances to shady business dealings. Remarkably, the plot feels coherent despite the seven points of view, but the novel falters thematically; it could have been a sensitive exploration of the sometimes-absurd lengths we'll go to protect the people we love, but it turns into a diffuse attempt to do too much. The novel's events take place in the shadow of the approaching Holocaust, but the author fails to engage meaningfully with it and so it reads like an afterthought. Perhaps Beanland thought writing a story about Jews set in the 1930s that doesn't deal with that tragedy would be frivolous or insensitive, but the result of her half-baked approach is an "add-Holocaust-and-stir" effect that lacks emotional verisimilitude. In addition, some of the Jewish details in the novel are historically dubious if not incorrect. In this regard, it is reminiscent of the hit show The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel; also in this regard, the particularity of the setting may nonetheless be enough to buoy it, particularly for those interested in little-known pieces of American Jewish culture. A unique if occasionally overreaching novel for lovers of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

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July 1, 2020
In 1934, Florence Adler has aspirations to be the next Gertrude Ederle and swim across the English Channel, but she drowns weeks before she can travel from Atlantic City to France. Her family's mourning is complicated by Florence's sister, Fannie, who is pregnant and hospitalized on bed rest, so parents Joseph and Esther decide to keep Florence's death a secret. Over the course of the summer, the family juggles their grief and their worry about Fannie as well as concerns about events in Europe. Joseph secured a student visa for Anna, the daughter of his former fianc�e, but he has less success arranging papers for her parents, who, like Anna, are Jewish. Anna, separated from her parents and greeted with indifference or hostility by the Adlers, turns to Stuart, Florence's former swimming coach. Their sweet romance is one of the many highlights of the story. Loosely based on her own family history, Beanland's first novel is a strong family drama. While the ending tidies each storyline up a bit perfectly, this is a finely realized work of historical fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)