Melissa Clark, Swimming Upstream, Slowly

Swimming Upstream, Slowly

Melissa Clark

Broadway, September 2006, $12.95

ISBN: 0767925262

In Los Angeles, twenty-seven year old Sasha Salter already is the executive director of an Emmy Award winning popular children's television show, Please Pass the Salter, based on her thesis that children learn when they are amused. Everything seems to be going her way until her gynecologist Dr. Banks informs her she is pregnant. The only problem with that diagnosis is that Sasha has not had intimate relations in over two years.

Though he has doubts about her honesty and abstinence, Dr. Banks sends Sasha to UCLA researcher Dr. Rusmeuth. He explains he is an expert on male fertility and mentions the condition Lazicum spermatozoa, "lazy sperm" that remains dormant while relaxing in a comfortable biological home until the sperm finally decides to fertilize her egg. Sasha wonders who the father is as she considers lazy sperm, lazy bum with her two best friends providing her with emotional support.

Though Sasha has to be the calmest person on the planet, SWIMMING UPSTREAM, SLOWLY is a solid contemporary fiction, starring a likable protagonist caught in what seems the impossible, but the ambitious unscrupulous Dr. Rusmeuth (seizes the opportunity with the celeb) makes it appear viable. Readers will enjoy traveling with Sasha as she goes back over her encounters in an attempt to discover whose sperm hibernated inside her body.