*Special thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review. Pub date: May 2, 2023

I appreciate a YA horror story that gets right into it and builds the world throughout instead of explaining it all at the start. We get just enough information to be intrigued and just enough action to get hooked by this one early on. Unfortunately it lost me a few chapters in because it went from giving interesting details to suddenly making the details seem taboo. Instead of coming across mysterious, it left me frustrated as a reader. If you can overlook that, you may enjoy this one!

No one in the town of Hillwoods goes near the water. Terrible things have happened. The pool is empty and closed. The lake is avoided. People are missing and dying. Bronwyn and her parents have returned because her grandmas health is declining. Her cousin Anais is trying to protect her from learning about the rituals and why the kids do them. There is someone watching and danger is everywhere. A great mystery! I enjoyed reading this. Most drama is around the students and how they try to avoid all the haunted spots. Would rate as a YA read.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC of this title! I have been waiting for this book for too long! I look forward to reading and reviewing, as the feedback from others has made this title incredibly intriguing. I know I'll be wowed!

I really enjoy reading YA books and because I spend a little time in a middle school LMC every day I look forward to being able to talk to the students about some of them.

I found this book to be confusing and some of it truly just didn't make sense for me. For instance, were the girls into each other, not into each other? They weren't friends really even though they spent a lot of time together. Just a lot of 'talking' without really saying anything - at least that is how I felt.

I was really hopeful - as an avid swimmer in my younger years, I was interested in that aspect of the story.

There were a few things that I found hard to grasp. What was the deal with the fact that everyone in town knew about Sweetie but didn't leave town to go somewhere else? And why does no one in town ever leave? Or why don't friends/family come to town to visit? I felt there was so much potential but it just didn't live up to it for me.

Release May 2 2023

Welcome to small-town America Folk Horror: here, specifically Ozark Folk Horror. No intended offense to the population of the Ozarks, but the citizens of this community harbor beliefs that might be expected in villages of Scotland or England or Wales in the Middle Ages! [You know, they burned Witches then, too!] Okay, no Witch-burnings in this community, but as you will find out for yourself when you read this very special and engrossing novel that some real evil exists here, right here in this small town, some really horrid villains going about their daily lives disguising their bigotry and Superstition, and tossing Rationality and Logic out the metaphorical window.

WE DON'T SWIM HERE brings strong POC and LGBT+ rep, never browbeating but bringing it subtly so that we become immersed in the story. It also stands firm on "Speaking Truth to Power," and this is prevalent throughout the book and in multiple situations. [I.E., NOT all the villains are Old White Guys. Feel me.]

This was a solid horror book but it wasn't anything special. I did like the main characters however, which made up for some of it.

I liked Vincent Tirado’s first book, and this one has a great premise. However, this one didn’t gel with me as much.

When I heard that Vincent Tirado had a new book coming out, I was very, very excited because their previous book, "Burn Down, Rise Up," was absolutely excellent. I was also very glad to see that the book ended up as a finalist on the Bram Stoker Award final ballot for works released in 2022 in the Young Adult category. There has been a recent explosion of BIPOC people including Black, Afro-Latine, Latine, South East Asian Indian, Chinese, Korean, and so many more authors of colour and from intersecting marginalizations including queerness and disability coming to the forefront with more books that are reflective of the experiences of the readers, primarily younger or teen but also adults, who are enjoying these #ownvoices stories that are done at the helm of a creator of colour.

In "We Don't Swim Here," already the title suggests some of the racial segregation of Jim Crow, reminding or perhaps hearkening back to readers who may not be aware that during the Jim Crow era, swimming pools became a contested area that white supremacist lawmakers and everyone from 'community control' and 'concerned neighbours,' so basically white racists, worked really hard to get rid of. They enforced laws about how Black and brown children were "not allowed" to swim in public pools, or any others that might have been available to them (and if you think about the segregation policies aimed at keeping Black adults out of country clubs and private clubs, then you can imagine the effect it had on the children as well). In fact, these white supremacist bigots went so far as to fill the public pools with concrete so that nobody could swim in them. They defunded them. They did things that sent the loud and clear message that they did not want Black people in swimming pools (to be clear, they didn't want Black people anywhere in 'white spaces' and stores and establishments and churches and so much more, but swimming pools were ones that gained notoriety in addition to everything going on).

In Tirado's novel, the protagonist is Bronwyn. She is visiting Hillwoods for a year where her grandmother is in hospice care, and her father needs to get other important things sorted out.

She is warned repeatedly not to go into the water. This reminded of a subtle homage to Tananarive Due's story "The Lake." Water is a crucial theme, even more crucial in Black stories, not only because of the intergenerational trauma of ships full of enslaved people of African descent who were forcibly transported under the most unspeakable of circumstances, and dragged to the "New World" where, if they survived the voyage, they became sent to a life of enslavement. This is the reason that some Black commenters today will mention they feel uncomfortable with ships or cruises of any kind, which is understandable.

Another aspect of Black people being told not to go into the water is because of hair. Many Black women and folks who identify as woman and girls have the problem that when water touches their hair whether it's from the shower or rain or another source, it reverts to its natural state, which has been described in the most offensive terms you can think of by whites primarily--adjectives like 'nappy' or 'kinky' or 'wild bushes of hair' and so on. Black women and women-identifying folks and in many cases men, like Colin Kaepernick, have talked about the pressures of having their hair 'cleaned up' and sanitized with hot combs or other painful straightening measures because otherwise, they have heard their entire lives that they look 'unprofessional' or 'unkempt' or 'not suitable/presentable' and have been regularly discriminated against for the appearance of their hair and for keeping natural hair and not straightening or other undergoing painful -- and dangerous -- chemical modifications to keep their hair straight so that it is 'acceptable' because that is what [white] Western society demands. Thankfully, the Crown act we have seen in the United States in the past few years has been fighting against that very strongly.

There is another aspect of Black people made fearful to get their hair wet as we saw in another standout from 2022, the YA Horror by Tiffany D. Jackson, "The Weight of Blood,' in which the protagonist, who passes for white and has been forced to pass for white her entire life by her white father (her Black mother is a missing/not present but spoken about character for much of the book). And one day because of a prank, one of her horrendous classmates gets her hair wet, and it reverts to its natural state, and it looks like, as her classmates say, Black hair, and it reveals that she is mixed race. Which as you can imagine, doesn't go very well for the rest of the book.

In Tirado's narrative, Bronwyn wants desperately to go in the water, a gorgeous lake, but also a pool at an abandoned recreational centre. There's also another one in the high school basement.

Danger ensues, which is putting it mildly. The terrors that come are not what the reader might expect at first. In this way, the book has a similar energy to a film like 'Bodies Bodies Bodies' where you know that something terrible is going to happen to a lot of people in this house, and not just because of the title or the trailer. you know something terrible and that terrible things, in fact, are going to happen, but you're not sure when, and when they do happen, they surprise the reader like "WOW--I did not see that coming!" There's also that "then and now" narrative dynamic where Bronwyn discovers that this has happened before through diary entries of a girl from the 1960s. The reader becomes scared that history is going to repeat itself, and also how Bronwyn is going to escape this situation.

There is always, always that "second book syndrome" thing that people discuss in publishing and that authors fear a lot -- the phenomenon of an author releasing a killer debut novel, and then the sophomore effort of the second book and the weight, the expectations, the needing to know if it's a hit and if readers loved it, if it sells as many or close to many copies as the first, and this is that situation. I loved Tirado's first book and I love even more this second book! Keep your eyes on this gifted YA horror star -- they're doing amazing things !

First off...DISCLAIMER: I requested this title on Netgalley. Thanks to Sourcebooks Fire for providing an ecopy. This didn't influence my review in any way.

First off - please note that I didn't have any issues with the writing style or the characters, but regardless, I had to throw in the towel after a few chapters 🙁. This ended up being another instance of "I didn't buy the premise" - and yeah, of course I read the blurb before I requested an ARC, but I guess I expected something different...something, well, less forced. For one thing, there's no foreshadowing whatsoever - the visiting girl is dropped straight into a world of rituals and secrets, except everyone expects her to be a passive spectator and not to ask questions. Besides, I can't believe that no one in Hillwoods ever considered relocating (unless there's a reason why they can't, but if there is, I didn't get that far...and anyway, why was the protagonist's family able to leave, then?). And I can't buy that the visiting girl's dad (who grew up in Hillwoods) didn't know anything about the local curse, whatever the explanation was (again, I didn't get that far). All this was keeping me at an arm's length from the story, so I decided a DNF was in order. But if you're interested in small-town supernatural mysteries, familial relationships and Black + lesbian rep, and if you can suspend disbelief about the points I made, by any means pick this book up.

This was a very solid follow-up to Tirado's debut (which was excellent), and I really appreciated how their focus on historically-grounded racial horror continued in this horror/thriller book too. I will say, there were a few plot holes that lingered with me after the book's (slightly abrupt) conclusion, and I wanted to know more about the town and its issues in general, but this remains a great YA horror novel. (And its overall political and ideological underpinnings are so great too! So glad to see more books like this for YA readers.)

Thank you to the publisher for providing a review copy of this book.

I think this was a me problem. I went into this unaware that it was YA. Now, I don’t have any issue with YA, I do read some of that genre, but the characters in We Don’t Swim Here just read so young and immature that I had trouble staying interested. The mystery was intriguing, but not enough to offset the plot holes I noticed. I really have no idea how they expected her to live there a whole year without noticing anything! I think this book would be perfect for younger teens who are interested in the horror/thriller genre.

With all the collateral damage, the punishments the ghost Sweetie hand out seem harsh. But vengeful ghosts aren't known for their gentleness. If only she'd possessed someone decades sooner, a lot of people could have avoided sizzling to death in a lake.

When Sweetie finally does possess a high school girl named Bronwyn, all hell breaks loose. Have you ever tried fitting in as the new kid in school while being inhabited by a ghost intent on murder? It's not the best way to make friends.

I do wonder, though, why the parents don't leave Bronwyn back at their big city home. The girl was about to make the freaking Olympic swim team. Instead, they bring her to a small town where "nobody swims here." That should be a really big clue that the Olympic trials won't be held there. All the town's pools are drained, the lake sizzles, and unfortunate rituals rule the small city. Of course, if her parents left Bronwyn with an accommodating friend, the novel would have been two pages long and the Sweetie ghost would never tell her story or rid the world of icky people.

Lots of eye rolling and smirking. I dusted off both the eyeball-roll-o-meter and my smirk-o-meter for this one. If you read my other reviews, you know that eyeball rolling and smirking drive me nuts because I want the authors to be more original than that. They come up with unique stories only to have all the teens doing all the same things.

Thanks to Netgalley and Sourcebooks Fire for allowing me to read and review an eARC of We Don't Swim Here.

I initially picked this book up because I’m fascinated by small town curses and I was interested in seeing how Tirado executed the curse in We Don’t Swim Here. Things I loved about this book was the description of the small town, how the community operates by a set of mysterious rules, a possible siren haunting, reunited family, sibling-like dynamic between characters, and a diverse cast. Things I felt could’ve been handled better: The idea that this town has a set of mysterious rules is interesting. However, the rules themselves were confusing and unclear from start to finish. It was also very frustrating that no one was willing to tell Brownwyn what the rules were but somehow expected her to be able to follow them anyways. It felt contradicting and hard to buy and kept me just as out of the loop as Brownwyn, which made me feel frustrated too, but not in a good way. There a lot of loose ends that didn’t get tied up in this book. For example, the ghost bus. We’re introduced to it in the beginning. It seems to even be a motivation for Anais, and then it sort of never gets mentioned again. Overall, I liked the book for what was done well but I think there were some missed opportunities.

I read a lot of YA thrillers, and this was really unique! I loved the alternating perspectives between the characters, the historical element, and the tie to the multiple generations. A great change of pace if you are feeling burnt out by YA thriller tropes.

We Don't Swim Here is a captivating supernatural thriller from start to finish. Filled to the brim with twists and a captivating plot, this one is sure to keep readers hooked. The characters are well-developed. The story is incredibly fast-paced. This is one not to be missed! Highly recommended! Be sure to check out We Don't Swim Here today.

This proves, once again, that I can always trust Tirado to hand deliver a great, anxiety-inducing YA horror novel with a side of heart palpitations and nausea.

I started this about a week ago and realized I wasn't in the right mood for it, so I set it aside for later. Yesterday I picked it up again and I haven't been able to put it back down. I only allow myself to read horror novels at night so that I'm in the perfect, eerie mood. I stayed up until about 3am last night getting through the first half of this book—it was impossible for me to tear my eyes away—, and then I impatiently waited all day today for darkness to settle in so I could get back to it. There were some truly bone-chilling passages in this and even more nauseating moments that I will not be forgetting anytime soon.

I loved both the main characters in this, but I think Anais is my favourite. I can never get enough of a sapphic Final Girl who feels like she has the weight of the world on her shoulders and struggles to ask for help.

I also adore a good haunting / doppelgänger trope, and I think it fit really well in this story. Following Bronwyn as she lost control of herself was exactly the kind of thing I love to read in a horror novel, and whereas I sometimes think it can confuse the reader or get in the way of the plot, it was really well-executed in this case.

I did however have a couple of issues. I'm noticing a bit of a pattern in Tirado's work: I feel like we never truly get enough from the characters. I want to know more about them, about their relationships, about the way that they view the world and themselves. This book is actually quite short and, I don't say this often, but I think it would have benefitted from being a bit longer. Just 50 pages or so, to give the reader a stronger sense of who the main characters are and get even more emotionally attached to them and their stories.

I also feel that, unlike the lore in Tirado's debut novel Burn Down, Rise Up, things were a lot less clear in this story. It does make sense at first, since the characters themselves don't seem to really understand what's going on. But I was hoping for things to be a lot more clear by the end of the novel. There are still some aspects of the story that I wouldn't be able to fully and accurately explain, even after finishing the book.

That being said, although I did prefer Tirado's first story, I loved this book, and I would absolutely recommend it to people looking for something that'll keep them up all night and on the edge of their seat.

Bronwyn is only supposed to be in rural Hillwoods for a year. Her grandmother is in hospice, and her father needs to get her affairs in order. And they're all meant to make some final memories together.

Except Bronwyn is miserable. Her grandmother is dying, everyone is standoffish, and she can't even go swimming. All she hears are warnings about going in the water, despite a gorgeous lake. And a pool at the abandoned rec center. And another in the high school basement.

I couldn't get past the obvious questions of the plot with this one. Really, all of the water sources are closed down and it's not really questioned. There's no lead-in to the issues, things just pop off. People are stuck in this town. Or are they? How did this not come up before moving? Hello? There's a competitive swimmer in the family? I just couldn't get into the premise. The characters were fine. The writing was fine. I just couldn't do it.

This book didn't really make since to me. I just didn't really understand what the point of this book was. I stopped reading because I just could not get into it.

I really enjoyed this one! I love a good ghost story and Vincent Tirado provided a great one with a perfect twist. Add in family drama and enough secrets to drown you and you have a captivating book that you wont want to miss!