I bought the audio version of Joshilyn Jackson’s latest novel, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, to fill ten hours’ of soccer tournament drive time with something other than mother-teen daughter arguing. I like women’s fiction, especially Southern flavor; my daughter likes ghost stories and mysteries. TGWSS promised both.

And the promise was fulfilled, in spades. We were so enthralled by Jackson’s storytelling that we not only avoided arguing, we very nearly avoided going home. The climax of the book takes place in a depressed, depressing Alabama mining town called “DeLop.” As we approached our own anything-but-depressed Alabama college town with two more cd’s to go, my daughter plugged DeLop into the GPS, thinking that we could best experience the thrilling resolution there.

Of course, there is no place in Alabama named DeLop.

But depressed, depressing mining towns from which people escape to raise children, who then grow up to raise their own children in gated, upscale, HOA- and gossip-controlled suburban neighborhoods certainly do exist. So do people like protagonist Laurel Hawthorne, a happily-married art quilter whose love for her adolescent daughter, Shelby, directs the movement of Laurel’s life the way unexplained forces move the planchette of a ouija board.

(I learned that this was the name of the ouija board’s moving piece from TGWSS, by the way. I told you it was a ghost story.)

People like Laurel do exist, and they doubtless have their secret struggles, just as Laurel does. The first of hers is a tendency to sleepwalk out the door or window and down the street, often with dangerous implements in hand. The second, and related, is an ability to see ghosts, such as the one who leads her to the body of the young girl drowned in Laurel’s swimming pool. The third struggle is her relationship with her controlling and over-the-top actress older sister, Thalia.

Jackson’s characters are so vivid that you’ll swear you could meet them if you were in the right place at the right time. Her pacing is so masterful that you’ll swear by a hundred different plausible solutions to the mystery of the drowned girl. And her voice is so compelling that an aspiring writer, like me, will just plain swear, out of pure envy.

The Girl Who Stopped Swimming is more intense than typical “mama lit,” I think, but at its heart is the mystery of motherhood, and how it can only be truly understood in light of our daughterhood. Definitely mama lit material. But don’t worry: there are plenty of bust-out-laughing episodes (generally involving Thalia).

It’s a really, really good read. And should it lead you to Alabama in search of DeLop, be sure to stop by my little town for some mama talk over a glass of sweet tea!