Swimming In It
by Patricia Wild

Soft Cover, 120 pages
Fiction - Adult
ISBN - 1-886388-13-X

Jewell, the complex, richly imagined narrator of the flood of dramatic inner and outer events in Wild's novel, grows through them to find a voice, self-understanding, and healing in the community of a shelter for sexually abused women. The concretely described setting is Somerville, a multiethnic, industrial subcity of Boston. The homeless in the shelter Quaker worship, and the new- and old-style Quakers who founded and run the house experience their own limits, but show what non-violent love can achieve in "the ocean of darkness."
- Hugh Barbour, Professor emeritus, Eartham College

Swimming In It explores wiithout sensationalism or romanticism, with neither pity nor undue reverence, the strategies that allow women simultaneously to survive and to perpetuate their trauma. Patricia Wild unflinchingly explores the roles that sexual abuse and domestic violence play in too many women's lives, especially in lives lived out in shelters. Even with a life-line, some women will drown, some will tread water and swim in it. And some with swim through. Patricia WIld understands that women need long-term, healthy relationships and support, not just structure and guildlines, to heal. She also understands and communicates the importance of luck and the dizziness that comes from personal triumph.
- Katya Fells, Founder and Executive Director, On the Rise, Inc.

I found memories of my life on many pages. Someone like me who still lives with the powerful history of incest and abusive men can relate to these women. The book is real. There were times as I read when I had to stop and walk away from a few minutes. I just had to respectively ponder some particularly moving part.
- A formerly homeless women