The author, Elaine McCluskey, does live in Novia Scotia. She was involved in swimming clubs (though she avers in a postscript that her children's experiences were 180 degrees different (and better) than those she writes about here). Perhaps most importantly, she was a press bureau chief and still teaches journalism. This gives her solid credentials to write the story the way she did, which I will explain briefly.
I'm not entirely sure you can SPOIL the plot when some key elements were already on the back cover blurbs, however, McCluskey does go to some trouble to withhold information from the reader for quite some time, so I will go along with the charade...
Minor SPOILERS follow
The novel is more or less launched because a terrible event occurs in Myrtle, Nova Scotia (someone has poisoned 8 bald eagles), which leads to quite a bit of press coverage, including a 2000 word feature in a major Toronto newspaper (apparently modelled after the Toronto Star) accompanied by a photo of a high school girl and a young man. The photo is referred to several times as being along the lines of a Diane Arbus picture. While there is no actual photo in the book, the cover gives a fairly good representation of what the photo looked like, with a couple of differences.
First, the girl (Rita) was described as being fairly heavy. Second, there is a boy and his dog in the background, but these don't appear at all on the cover. It turns out that the book is actually narrated by Rita and the boy (Hubert). It's implied that both* are writing long journal entries or perhaps even letters (to the press?) to tell what led up to that terrible day and the aftermath. (It's not impossible that McCluskey was inspired by Hoban's Turtle Diary, though Rita and Hubert hardly interact in Myrtle.)
While we do find out (eventually) who actually killed the eagles, the book is not truly that concerned with this person, but rather the way the fallout from all the media attention impacted Rita and others. McCluskey is pretty good on this aspect of the story (and derives a very unflattering portrait of her star journalist, who loves to make people from small towns fell small). McCluskey also has a fair bit to say about Diane Arbus and how she didn't really seem to think about how she would thrust children into the spotlight in very unflattering ways.**
One of the main themes running through this book is how adults don't really know best and that they can do quite a bit of damage to children. This may be because they simply don't know how to set appropriate boundaries (Drew's mother), or because they are in over their heads (Pammy, the swim coach), or because they simply prefer not to deal with reality (Rita's mother, Ethna). Hubert seems to have a decent relationship with his mother, but his father committed the ultimate sin of dying on him and leaving him quite bereft and adrift.
Another area McCluskey is pretty good on is how adults in positions of authority can typically get most kids to do anything (specifically Pammy duct tapes two children together and throws them in a pool, which really should have led to her immediate removal as swimming coach). As far as I can remember, I was generally outwardly respectful to authority figures but, on the inside, thought most adults were fairly clueless. (Of course, I still think this and haven't been proved wrong yet...)
While this sounds like it could be quite a downer of a book, it is quite amusing in many places and it is worth reading. The high school children do manage to swim upstream as it were and become adults (perhaps with a healthy distrust of authority figures and skepticism on how the media works). It is true, however, that none of them distinguished themselves that much at swimming, though a couple do ok after switching to other sports. As an aside, it is interesting to read a sports-themed novel focusing on the also-rans rather than teams on the cusp of a championship or even a winning season. I think I may circle back and write a bit about my experience as a teacher-chaperone to a high school team, but fortunately nothing quite as awful happened to any of the young women on our team (though I suppose a few did get pregnant too young).
* While it is important to get both perspectives to sort of triangulate a lot of things that happened in Myrtle (Rita has the inside scoop on the swim team and Hubert spent more time with "outsiders" in the town), one small criticism is that they both end up sounding very much alike, and it often takes a paragraph or two to tell which character is actually writing.
** I assume he's told the story various ways over the years, but McCluskey found some sources on Colin Wood (the boy with the grenade) where he implied that being in the photograph caused him quite a bit of grief over the years. However, in this article, he seems more sanguine about it, indicating that much of his stress at that time in his life came from his family and not from the photograph per se.
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