Here are some reviews of my novel Swimming with Tigers.
A couple of these reviews appeared on Amazon, where I currently have nine, but apparently I need 50 to even begin to be seen by a customer who didn’t actually type in the exact title and name in the search box, so some more (good!) reviews would be very welcome.
Amazon reviews are super-important for self-published books like mine. Even if you didn’t buy my book on Amazon you can still review it if you’ve spent £40 in a year on anything at all from Amazon. (By the way, I would rather not be connected to one of Trump’s tech bros but this is the way the self-publishing world currently works; Goodreads is owned by Amazon too.) Even a one-line review will help, but I’d love to hear in detail what you thought of the characters, their story and the setting of the novel. And do let me know if you liked the cover.
Anyway, I want to thank everyone who took the time to write down what they thought of my book and thereby support me and encourage me to continue writing and publishing.
Details on where to buy my book are at the end.
Enjoy!
Robert-John Evans
(This is an extract from a long review essay on Robert-John’s website Kuriositas.)
The novel opens in the Paris of January, 1938 (it ends in September 1940 so covers almost three years). We are quickly introduced to the dual protagonists (whose novel it really is, I will deal with later). At the forefront, there is the post-debutante, neo-artist Penelope, an English rose with more than a few greenfly. Then, there is Suzanne, a young woman with little balance (physically and emotionally), returning to Paris to confront her past. Their chance meeting initiates the narrative drive of the novel, the beginning of a long and layered awakening for both. As the story quickly unfolds, we learn that both are part of (or rather caught up in) the surrealist movement and the men who dominate and distort it.
Surrealism is an essential part of this story but if that might put you off, don’t allow it to. The “casual” reader doesn’t have to have knowledge of the movement – it is introduced and so explained organically to the reader through the fictional characters and scenes therein. I was half expecting extensive passages of explanatory exposition around the movement but they are mercifully absent.
I think if the novel is about anything, it’s about the exclusion of women from some thing (in this case surrealism) based almost solely on their gender and how they go about getting themselves included. Or, rather how they go about evolving themselves to the point where inclusion is irrelevant, unnecessary – unwanted even; they have moved on. This movement of character within the novel is, I think, its greatest achievement: its subtle, refined and beautifully poised development of the two female protagonists.
Femmy Witte
In 2024 I read several books in English, allthough English is not my native language. I had a tough nut to crack with Hilary Mantel’s books about Thomas Cromwell. Therefore, Kathy Hopewell’s novel Swimming with Tigers was a welcome surprise. It read like a dream and the story immediately captivated me: two young women try to find their way in life in the turbulent period before and at the beginning of the Second World War. Their search for their own identity is strongly intertwined with the dynamic circle of predominantly male surrealists in Paris. As muse and (former) mistress of central figures in that turbulent scene, they have a hard time finding and realizing their own destiny.
The story took me away and I became attached to the two women, Penelope and Suzanne, and their struggle on multiple fronts. Penelope wants to be an artist and be treated as an equal by her male colleagues. Suzanne fights to come to terms with her broken relationship with the leading artist of the Parisian circle and to gain control over the child she had from him.
The friendship that develops between these two women forms a thread in the beautiful and intimate story. It shows their vulnerability and at the same time their militancy and resilience in a threatening and changing world.
Another thread in the book is, for me at least, as important. Getting her inspiration for the main characters from the female artists that were part of the artistic movement of surrealism at the time, the author makes us aware that for a long time in the official history of surrealism, female artists have been significantly underexposed. She made me aware that artists like Dali, Picasso, Magritte, Miró and others were well know to me, but I hardly could name any female artist. In fact, I only was familiar with Frida Kahlo, though there have been at least as many women as men who created beautiful art within the movement.
Kathy Hopewell not only gave me a lot of reading pleasure, she pointed out an omission in my knowledge of surrealism for which I am very grateful. Thank you, Kathy, for putting these women in the spotlight they deserve!
Peter Rodgers
In Penelope and Suzanne, Kathy Hopewell has created two complex and intriguing characters. Suzanne in particular, with her perfectly rendered hallucinatory perspective, represents the lived experience of surrealism itself. She feels and sees what the artists merely represent, providing the reader with a direct viewport into the surreal.
Don’t let the fact that this is a work about ideas and art put you off – the narrative rattles along with the pace of a thriller and never gets bogged down in theoretical musings.
If I were to criticise, I would say that the male characters can come across – fittingly and indeed ironically in a novel about the marginalisation of the feminine – as less well rounded than the two female protagonists, sometimes there just to facilitate the movement of the plot or bring out qualities in the two main characters. But with two characters like Penelope and Suzanne – who cares?!!
Thoroughly recommended.
Anna Powell
On second reading, I noticed many new details and found myself even more immersed in the atmosphere, themes and plot. In her potent blend of function and fact, Hopewell exposes the shortcomings of a male-centred art movement, its disempowering fantasy of the ‘femme enfant’ and its sidelining of women’s art. Penelope, the protagonist, meets the elusive Suzanne by accident and their instant rapport and mutual support drives the narrative.
Hopewell’s character Suzanne is reborn from André Breton’s narcissistic ‘mad love’ for ‘Nadja’, a fictionalised real woman whose creative ideas and behaviour were a seminal influence on the movement. Instead of being Breton’s idealised muse, she emerges here as a complex and intriguing character in her own right.
The ongoing critical re-valuation of Carrington, Oppenheim, Agar, Varo and other women artists linked with Surrealism is the ideal context for Hopewell’s bold fictional intervention. Her amalgams of several artists, far from conventional biography, is confidently handled and solidly researched. Tracing the author’s compound characterisation is a stimulating detection process full of surprises.
Hopewell keeps the context of World War Two firmly in focus and its historical unfolding shapes the narrative’s onward flow as the mood darkens from the heady creative and erotic outset. She leaves us hoping for a sequel to this impressively imagined and engagingly written novel.
Where to Buy Your Copy of Swimming with Tigers
If you live in North Wales, UK, you can buy my book at Palas Print, Caernarfon and at Browers Bookshop in Porthmadog. Storiel in Bangor is also stocking it and there are copies available to borrow through Gwynedd Libraries.
Online, it is available as an ebook on Amazon or Kobo for £4.99, and in the U.S. from Barnes and Noble and the paperback version, RRP £9.99, is on Amazon and Blackwells
Alternatively, you can ask any good bookshop to order it in for you via IngramSpark or Gardners suppliers.