Book Review: How to Walk on Water

How to Walk on Water. Rachel Swearingen. New American Press, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 2020, Paperback, 175 pages.

Reviewed by Jose Nateras.

In How to Walk on Water, her debut collection, Rachel Swearingen presents readers with characters moving through lives that are simultaneously less than they dreamed of and more than they can handle.

Many of the stories in Swearingen's collection take place in the Midwest—most written while Swearingen was at Western Michigan University. She consistently subverts the idea of "Midwest Nice," revealing a sinister edge to her characters' interactions with neighbors, coworkers, and even family.

With Swearingen at the helm, romantically charged encounters between men and women become eerie with possibility and disaster ("Felina," "Notes to a Shadowy Man"). In her prose, regular people are revealed to have secrets, desires, and pains that unfold into Hitchcockian spirals. One example is "Mitz's Theory of Everything Series," wherein memories of a troubled friend haunt a young artist.

The Midwest Swearingen creates has less to do with location and more to do with a sense of longing and danger, feeling trapped by circumstance, and of longing for excitement while foreboding that disaster will come in its wake.

Swearingen is a skilled and graceful writer who manages to build tension and suspense with deft ease. She creates a sense of familiarity in stories of heartbreak and tragedy that work to satisfy readers without veering into predictability.

The sense of Midwestern charm in How to Walk on Water is not a charm that relies on sweetness or simplicity. Swearingen's characters are rarely friendly or kind in the ways Midwesterners might stereotypically be portrayed. Instead, at the heart of Swearingen's stories are people striving to hold on to the sparks of life that will allow them to keep moving forward, even if those sparks are as odd as eating bits of postcards ("Boys on a Veranda") or playing macabre pranks on one's neighbors ("Edith Under the Streetlight"). The charm lies in the fact that Swearingen manages to unpack these sometimes wild attempts to "keep moving forward" without judgment. Even when her characters behave in unexplainable or morally dubious ways (like illegally abducting a grandchild—"The Only Thing Missing Was the Howling of Wolves"), Swearingen paints a humanizing portrait of people trying their best.

Swearingen has amassed a series of awards for her writing, named one of 30 Writers to Watch by the Guild Literary Complex. Her stories in How to Walk on Water demonstrate why.