The Pools by e. lockhart
E. Lockhart’s The Pools is a strange, sad and adventurous YA novel that blends first love, folklore and grief into something deliberately unsettled. Set in a faded New England spa town built around twelve hot spring pools, the novel begins in a place where ritual has become ordinary. The townspeople swim after school, after dinner, for exercise, romance and habit. An old legend claims that people once entered the pools and became birds, but like many local stories, it has been softened by repetition until it no longer feels dangerous.
Then, on a freezing winter day, five people enter the water and wake the next morning transformed. Among them are Orly, the younger sister of Lexie, and Chester, the boy Lexie loves. What follows is not a conventional quest to break a spell, though Lexie does search for answers among doctors, healers, religious figures and family members who cannot help her. The novel is more interested in the emotional terror of watching those you love become unreachable, and in the awful knowledge that devotion does not always grant power.
Lockhart has long been drawn to unreliable feeling, fractured storytelling and the ways young people narrate pain to themselves. Here, the short, poetic chapters intensify that interest. The prose can feel jilted at first, even elusive, but its compression suits a story about shock and transformation. Those gaps matter. They give the novel the quality of a ballad or fairytale retold by someone still inside the wound.
Lexie and Chester’s relationship is central, though not always wholly persuasive in its first movement. Their connection forms quickly, and some readers may want more time with them before the novel asks us to carry the weight of their separation. Yet Lockhart is not writing an ordinary romance. The intensity of young love, its selfishness and sincerity, its need to name itself as destiny, is part of the book’s emotional design. Chester’s depression and Lexie’s burden of care give the relationship a darker undertow from the beginning.
The transformation into birds is the novel’s boldest and most divisive choice. It may strike some readers as too abstract, a symbolic gesture that resists easy interpretation. Yet its oddness is also what allows the book to move beyond realism. The bird bodies make visible the fear of losing someone to illness, despair, change or death while they are still present before you. Orly and Chester remain loved, but altered. They can be watched, fed, searched for, even sung to, but not restored.
At times, the novel’s lyricism keeps the reader at a slight distance from the characters’ interior lives. Its beauty can feel cool where the subject is burning. Still, The Pools has a quiet force. It is a book about wanting to save others and discovering the limits of that desire. Lockhart’s fantasy is eerie, melancholy and emotionally exact, especially in its understanding that love may be profound without being sufficient. For readers willing to accept its strangeness, The Pools offers a haunting meditation on identity, sacrifice and the grief of not being able to bring everyone back.
Reviewer: Chris Reed
Allen & Unwin
