Aguamarina

The 1968 Olympic Games, Mexico City. There, seventeen-year-old Jesse Austin loses the 100-meter freestyle to an Australian swimmer by mere thousandths of a second. That cruel, decisive moment, forever suspended in the blue-green of the Olympic pool, will haunt her for the rest of her life. Or, rather, for the rest of their lives. Because, after that initial scene, Carol Anshaw takes a prodigious creative leap to 1990, the year Jesse turns forty, and from which point the narrative splits into three possible lives for her. Each is the result of the different decisions she made after those Olympics, decisions that, depending on the case, have led her to marry, divorce, or remain single; to love men or women; to shut herself away in her native Missouri or flee as far away from it as possible. Each existence carries the weight of that failure; But it also captures lost and found loves, family relationships that strengthen or fade…