To Be Sung Underwater, Tom McNeal
To Be Sung Underwater, Tom McNeal
List: $31.99 | Sale: $22.40
Club: $15.99

To Be Sung Underwater
A Novel

Author: Tom McNeal

Narrator: Susan Boyce

Unabridged: 5 hr 42 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/02/2011


Synopsis

Judith Whitman always believed in the kind of love that "picks you up in Akron and sets you down in Rio." Long ago, she once experienced that love. Willy Blunt was a carpenter with a dry wit and a steadfast sense of honor. Marrying him seemed like a natural thing to promise. But Willy Blunt was not a person you could pick up in Nebraska and transport to Stanford. When Judith left home, she didn't look back.

Twenty years later, Judith's marriage is hazy with secrets. In her hand is what may be the phone number for the man who believed she meant it when she said she loved him. If she called, what would he say?

To Be Sung Underwater is the epic love story of a woman trying to remember, and the man who could not even begin to forget.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Laura on February 06, 2017

Yes, I'm married to him, but I'm still voting. Tom gave this novel to me in manuscript form on Christmas day 2009 after seven years of writing and revision, and I read it all day and into the night. I finished it at 2 a.m. It was the best Christmas I've ever had. I want a book to make me fall in lov......more

Goodreads review by Canadian Jen on March 07, 2016

Reading McNeal’s novel is like wrapping yourself up in a warm cocoon and never wanting to leave. This is the story of first love & the joy that comes of that innocence. It’s about the choices in life we make and how they might have played out differently. Judith, mid 40’s, has reached an impasse in......more

Goodreads review by Nancy on April 15, 2014

I don't know how to review this book. It was deeply moving and I don't have a category to neatly slide it under. The writing is absolutely beautiful and the experience of reading the book is visceral. Reader's Digest version misses the symbolism and the gathering of different threads to be mulled ov......more

Goodreads review by Andy on November 24, 2012

This novel has gotten great critical acclaim, but it left me empty. The story goes back and forth from Judith's high school years in a small Nebraska town and present day where she lives in southern California with her banker husband and only child while she works as a television film editor. The fla......more

Goodreads review by Lena on January 01, 2013

This novel about a 40-something LA film editor whose thoughts begin drifting back to the summer she loved a Nebraska farm boy gets off to a promising start. It was recommended to me for the quality of the writing, and I was in fact impressed with McNeal's lovely, carefully crafted prose. I was also......more


Quotes

"You don't so much read To Be Sung Underwater as you're consumed by it. The characters are unforgettable. The writing is staggering. More importantly, though, it's the courage of this book that sets it apart. It's the bravest, most beautiful book I've read in a long time."—Markus Zusak, author of The Book Thief

"Smart, sexy, gorgeous, and at times devastatingly sad--these words describe the woman at the heart of this wonderful novel almost as well as they do the book itself. This ravishing love story will envelop you for a few days and then linger for a long time thereafter."—Ann Packer, author of Swim Back to Me and The Dive from Clausen's Pier

"To Be Sung Underwater is such an immensely readable novel. McNeal has the enviable talent of making splendid writing look easy at no cost to the complexity and the beauties of what fascinates him (and me) -- the terrain occupied by women and men in love with each other. This is a wonderful book."—Richard Ford

"McNeal's ability to tell the story from a female point of view is shockingly accurate, as is his Richard Russo-esque ability to make small town characters simply complicated....a beautiful novel that bravely examines the effect a broken relationship can have on one's life path."—Carrie Keyes, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"An exceptional novel.... McNeal writes a kind of prose that's almost endangered today: natural, smooth and subtle."—Cynthia Crossen, The Wall Street Journal

"Bautifully written.... a compelling story, uniting the literary, character-driven novel with what eventually becomes quite a page turner.... This novel will make for great book-club discussions."—Sarah Willis, The Cleveland Plain-Dealer

"This lovely novel is quiet and smart, drawing you so deeply into the characters that the ending might just leave you coming up for air."—Gale Walden, Oprah Magazine

"Love stories have a terrible gravity, a centrifugal force. McNeal has created characters so dimensional, so memorable, that we are caught up in that urgency. Our rationality is compromised; the rules of the world fade away."—Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times