Tirado's second young adult horror novel is an alternating POV story following two main characters: cousins, Anais and Bronwyn. Anais has always lived in the small, rural, secluded town of Hillwoods, a place to which Bronwyn is now forced to move so that her entire family may spend time with her grandmother while she's in hospice. However, despite only having to be there for a year, Bronwyn is incapable of settling in. The community is incredibly standoffish, which may not be a surprise considering that this is a predominantly white area, and Bronwyn is Afro-Latina. But there's something particularly eerie about the town: swimming is outlawed. Despite the gorgeous lake nearby and a couple of pools in the high school and rec center, Bronwyn is explicitly told that she cannot go swimming. This poses a huge problem for her considering that she is a competitive swimmer back home and cannot go an entire year without training. And what baffles Bronwyn the most is that her cousin doesn't seem to care. Of course, Anais does care-which is exactly why she's trying to keep Bronwyn in the dark. The less she knows, the safer she is. The best thing to do in Hillwoods is to never ask questions and to ignore absolutely everything about the area: its rumours, its history, and its truth.
This novel is a great example of Tirado hand-delivering a great, anxiety-inducing story. I was on the edge of my seat following the characters as they uncovered the many bone-chilling mysteries of this incredibly odd town; I simply could not tear my eyes away from its pages.
Both characters are fantastic, and Tirado makes it so easy for the reader to instantly connect to them. It makes the novel that much more captivating because you root for them from the very beginning, and you want to follow them to the end of their story. If I had to pick a favourite of the two, it would be Anais. I will forever adore a sapphic Final Girl who has the weight of the world on her shoulders and struggles to ask for help from those around her.
I was also incredibly impressed that Tirado was able to write the story from both points of view, considering that one cousin knows so much more about the town's lore than the other. The were so many ways in which the pacing of the story could have been ruined with this writing choice: give us too much information through Anais and suddenly Bronwyn's chapters are less compelling or exhilarating; give us too little information from Anais' POV and it makes it difficult to care for her as a main character. Tirado did a fantastic job of balancing the amount of information that is offered to the reader within each chapter, keeping me intrigued all throughout the plot's unfolding.
It's also specifically a great horror novel because Tirado goes out of their way to offer their reader so many different types of horror. If you love a classic ghost haunting story, a claustrophobic small-town setting, a doppelgänger trope, or a Black horror story that analyses the intersections of oppression, this book has it all.
Before picking up this novel, I had read Tirado's first YA horror, Burn Down, Rise Up, and inevitably I was going to compare the two. Despite loving We Don't Swim Here, I do think the execution of Tirado's debut was slightly more effective. Even with the explanations provided at the end of the story, I can't say for certain whether I would be able to describe the lore and the conclusion of the novel to another person. Tirado's first book had a much clearer ending to me, which made their message and my analysis of the story that much more potent. However, with this novel, even by the last page, I remained slightly confused and uncertain about what exactly had happened. This would probably be easily rectified through a second read, and the general idea that Tirado wanted to express through their story is still quite clear. Nonetheless, I believe this remains an indication that Burn Down, Rise Up had a slightly better execution.
I have also started to notice a bit of a pattern in Tirado's work: I feel like we never truly get enough from their characters. From the get-go, I fall in love with them and I'm excited to get to know more about them, about their history, about their relationships, about the way that they view the world and think of themselves. And yet, I always feel like I don't get enough. The book is not particularly short for a YA novel, at around 320 pages depending on the edition you're reading, and yet, I do believe it would have benefitted from being just a bit longer. Another few dozen pages would give the reader a stronger sense of who the main characters are, allowing us to get even more emotionally attached to them and their stories.
Even so, the pros absolutely outweigh the cons, and I definitely would recommend this book, as well as Tirado's other work, to anyone looking for some solid YA horror.
Representation: Afro-Latina main characters, sapphic main character
Content warnings: body horror, blood, murder, grief, death, child death, racism, hate crime, gun violence, kidnapping, medical content