Salt Water

By Charles Simmons

Book Overview

In the summer of 1963 I fell in love and my father drowned....So begins this luminous story of a young man's passage through the dark turns of adult passion. A contemporary retelling of Turgenev's classic tale "First Love," Salt Water is set against a summer landscape of water, sand, and sky, and relates in seductive detail the momentous events that changed a family forever.
On an isolated island off the Atlantic coast, fifteen-year-old Michael and his parents begin their customary lazy vacation. When two exquisite flirts shatter the calm, Michael experiences the provocative mysteries and the consequences of various kinds of love -- romantic and sensual, paternal and filial.
William Faulkner Award-winning author Charles Simmons explores the very heart of the human need to be wanted, the intricacies of the father-son bond, and a boy's adolescence in all of its desires, confusion, and heartbreak.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0671035673
• ISBN13: 9780671035679
• Release Date: July 1999
• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

A Story Within A Story

This isn't just a coming of age story. It is a story about a son and an adolescent, a father and a husband and a man, and a wife and mother. Its a story about how lives are intertwined, separate and yet significantly connected, all at the same time. Its simple and elegant and definitely a quick read.

The Tragedy of Youth

What a wonderful story! Not your usual "coming of age" narration, but a stark tragedy. The first line tells you where the book will take you, but not when and how.The suspense is built up magnificently, with strong characters and believable action.

Should be nominated for the American Book Award in Fiction

This gem of a novel is about the varieties of love and its inevitable loss, about parents and how little their children understand them, about the brittle mysteries of human connections and how gratuitously the links can be snapped, about a man trying to figure out who and what he is by looking back at the painful anti-Eden of growing up. In the 80s, I reviewed Charles Simmons's "Wrinkles" for the LA Times. Some perceptive publisher should reissue "Wrinkles" as a companion piece to "Salt Water." This book is a rich mine lode for book clubs everywhere, for people who yearn for good writing, as deceptively clear as fresh water, for all of us who are still trying to figure out who we are, how we got here, who our parents are, and who our children.

Not a small masterpiece, a large masterpiece.

a former editor of the new york times book review, charles simmons is a man who chooses his words well. this book, like the others that preceded it, is well written, thoughtful, and, as is always the case with his work, masterful. my hat is off to him. i hope that others readers discover his brilliance.