Salt Water - Softcover

The New York Times Book Review A small masterpiece. Simmons has found the perfect, delicate, elegiac voice.

The Wall Street Journal The mastery of the telling...keeps one continually off balance until the maelstrom of a conclusion.

The Wall Street Journal A simple and spellbinding novel...grimly enchanting....A powerful, 20th-century tragedy of an American family.

Booklist A riveting story of youthful innocence consumed by betrayal. Remarkably enthralling and agonizingly revealing....Simmons...maneuvers unfalteringly between each of his characters....The book's opening line leads like a wick into a powder keg of unexpected consequences. Simply spellbinding.

Kirkus Reviews A little saga of adolescence...a perfectly-cut gem of its kind.

In the summer of 1963 I fell in love and my father drowned....So begins this luminous story of a young man's passage through the dark turns of adult passion. A contemporary retelling of Turgenev's classic tale "First Love,"Salt Water is set against a summer landscape of water, sand, and sky, and relates in seductive detail the momentous events that changed a family forever.
On an isolated island off the Atlantic coast, fifteen-year-old Michael and his parents begin their customary lazy vacation. When two exquisite flirts shatter the calm, Michael experiences the provocative mysteries and the consequences of various kinds of love -- romantic and sensual, paternal and filial.
William Faulkner Award-winning author Charles Simmons explores the very heart of the human need to be wanted, the intricacies of the father-son bond, and a boy's adolescence in all of its desires, confusion, and heartbreak.