Helpful Score: 5
Swimming Toward the Ocean is an unexpectedly sweet, poignant tale about internal life vs external appearances. I come from an immigrant background and was moved to think about my own grandparents from a new perspective by this book--I was left wondering what secret longings my grandparents had that may or may not have been unfulfilled, while they toiled daily, speaking broken English that others assumed meant they were not so intelligent, and having traded a life of education and relative ease in Italy for a life of manual labor and continual underestimation to chase the American dream. This book is a quick read that illuminates with a laser focus one family's journey to assimilation, and has as its main character a woman who is very bright but uneducated by circumstances beyond her control. It chronicles her maturing and 'Americanization', and gives an excellent glimpse into her internal life as she struggles to satisfy her yearnings as a woman in new surroundings and country.
