The Sea of Light

The Sea of Light is a wise, beautiful, and very American story of three women and their desire to excel and win - and heal one another - in the highly charged world of athletic competition. Angelita is the hurricane that brings down a plane carrying a team of star-quality swimmers, groomed from childhood to compete at the international level. Babe Delgado is a young Cuban-American woman, presumed dead, who is rescued from the crash. Fifty-one hours in the Atlantic have left her scarred in body and spirit, afraid to compete again. Brenna Allen is a tough, driven swim coach at a small university, grieving for a lover lost to cancer. She finds solace in building her own winning team, driving her overworked captain, Ellie Marks, ever harder. Ellie is a child of holocaust survivors, struggling to own herself and her sexuality as hard as she's working to win. Brenna recruits Babe, promising to help her rebuild her damaged body, strength, and will. The Sea of Light is a story of wins, losses, and passions in a world where destiny and magic interfere with victory, where families are forced to reconcile with private hurts and false dreams, and where a redemptive, healing love between women - erotic and overwhelmingly intimate - stands in stark contrast to the expectations of the world. A sensitive, powerful tale of self-discovery, sexual identity, and violent emotions unleashed by sudden disaster, this novel is sure to command attention and acclaim.

Levin ( Water Dancer ) explores the interconnectedness of mind and muscle in this uncommonly expressive, sensual novel of three female athletes. Each character follows a cycle of pain, loneliness and rebirth; each applies a resolve born of years of physical and mental conditioning to the healing process. Brenna Allen, a steely swim coach at Northern Massachusetts State University, inspires her team's ambition, fear and resentment. As she pushes each swimmer to excel, she never admits that she is grieving for a longtime lover who has died of cancer, nor that her lover was a woman. Dynamic, solitary swim-team captain Ellie Marks knows she lacks the body structure of a top competitor, but she gives all her energy to swimming; otherwise, out of the water, she battles the fear of informing her parents, Holocaust survivors, that she is a lesbian. Cuban-American swimmer Mildred "Babe" Delgado, a onetime Olympic hopeful, comes to the university on a scholarship after surviving an oceanic plane crash that killed almost all of her teammates. Scarred, out of shape and dispirited, Babe needs Brenna's gruff encouragement and Ellie's companionship. Some of Levin's flourishes verge on melodrama, but her lyricism and compelling narrative more than compensate. With her sensitive depictions of lesbian sexuality, Levin might be the female counterpart of Paul Monette; her novel reverberates in the imagination long after the the reader has turned the final pages.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.