Otis is a swimmer that has little to no hope with his swimming skills. He’s good but his mind always strays to another thing during practices: Meg. Meg is his childhood love, someone he has always thought about day in and day out. They had just begin a budding relationship from best friends to lovers when a tragedy struck. Otis’s younger brother Mason died in Meg’s house as a result of negligence. At least that’s what Otis’s family believes. So when Meg was forced to move away to deal with her own grief, Otis just received another burden he had to carry. For almost three years, there had been silence on Meg’s end as Otis constantly pours his heart out onto pages and pages of letters that seems to never have been opened. So instead, he works on himself and gradually throws himself into swimming to forget.

In his journey to become a good swimmer on his team, he meets Dara, an amputee that has made it her life mission to get him to the Olympics. Her confidence in him is astounding as she also trains him with harsh words and a limited diet. Dara’s past is troubled as she was once a great swimmer, but after a shark accident, she’s been missing her right arm and can’t swim as well. She also constantly struggles with phantom limb pains and the only thing that resolves that is a mirror box. She now spends her days driving Otis around and asserting that practice is something that needs to be a first priority. They had just gotten into the flow of things and as quickly as she left, Meg reappeared in his life. A startling text message and a cryptic poem was the start to a new journey of dealing with the aftermath of such a loss.

I was actually fairly disappointed with this book as I really loved Otis as a character and by the way he was talking about Meg as the only person who really understood him, I expected her to be someone who was kind and caring as well as much more lovable. But when we actually got the first glimpse of her, I realized that she left for all these years without a single word to Otis and struts back in with a new boyfriend and a life just to “reconnect” with him. He does still love her so much, however, I felt like the way she acted rubbed me the wrong way as she talked like she deserved to have him love her and take her back just because they have so much history together. I felt like the progression of the plot was a bit slow, but it was entertaining. This is a book about healing from grief and making us aware of what effects grief has on people and I did think that the author showed that amazingly. She was able to include Dara’s grief about her loss of her dreams and how Mason’s death tore apart two families that were inseparable.

All in all, I would give this book an 8/10 as there were some inconsistencies in the plot and I wasn’t a big fan of one of the main characters, but that’s just personal preference. I really did love how the author used the title and included it in the book. I would recommend this for anyone who wants to read a second love story with a lot of grief.

Phantom Limbs by Paula Garner is available to check out from the Mission Viejo Library.