Learning to Swim, by Ann Turner

   

Learning to Swim, by Ann Turner

This collection of free verse captures the tragic summer of young Ann Turner at a summer home.  During this stream of dark memories, Ann suffocates under the pressure of constant sexual abuse by an older neighbor boy, while at the same time trying to comprehend her adolescence and development.  Because of its first person perspective, Turner's horrific story becomes more real with each stanza.

This text is filled with graphic sexual abuse and violent references, so this would make the text somewhat difficult and uncomfortable to read as an entire class.  Reading this aloud in class would be a disaster, especially with the personal experiences of students in the classroom taken into consideration.  Although I found this book to be absolutely amazing and inspiring to all of those who not only have dealt with sexual abuse, but also to anyone who has ever carried a burden.  This book would be great for smaller lit. circles to read alone and discuss, but Turner's courageous confession would serve problematic and contradicting to be on a required reading list.

Learning to Swim is a quick read that should take a student no longer than an hour to finish and gather his/her overall understanding of the text, so the actual reading period of the book can be placed in a day length time period, but there are many options for branching off of the powerful ideas and imagery present in these poems (i.e. pink swimming ring, etc.) that can be grasped by students in a secondary level classroom.