Review: SWIMMING WITH CROCODILES

SWIMMING WITH CROCODILES by Julie Ryan (Orakei Press, 2024)

Reviewed by BJ Chippindale

Swimming with Crocodiles is Book Two of the journeys of Dennis Bogdanovich, sanitary engineer and keen fisherman, last seen in Book One, Swimming with Big Fish.

Dennis is released from Guantanamo Bay, thanks to some New Zealand pressure. Joe Farouki, his only prison friend, persuades Dennis to go see London in the aftermath of the recent EMP bomb attack on the way to recover Dennis’s precious boat. Things don’t turn out as he expects, and Dennis ends up nowhere near his boat, or the sea. Dennis is an optimistic and some would say naïve man, but is about to have his optimism and naivety severely challenged in Syria..

The middle book in a trilogy is always challenging, but Julie Ryan makes it interesting as Dennis Bogdanovich travels the world (sometimes in the custody of various law enforcement organizations) and works his way back towards his beloved boat. 

His character is well developed now. He is learning, and his decisions are improving, but he still makes some bad ones, and somehow survives them, mostly by being himself. He makes some new friends, muddles through the middle of the Syrian civil war, but never gives up on his boat. The risk of spoiling the book increases with every word I add, so I will not provide more details. 

It is a good book, again starting somewhat slowly but picking up steam along the way and going quite well by the end. Well enough that I looked forward to book three. This book is not really a standalone, as it is a much better reading experience in the context of the first book, and both of them are needed for the third (and the trilogy as a whole) to work. Swimming with Crocodiles sets you up to fully experience the concluding volume; the three together are one large story. 

The difficulty is that the story is too large to be printed in a single book, but it really is just one story being told in instalments. Trilogies get written because a really good story takes time in the telling, and Julie Ryan is telling us a really good story.

It is well worth the time we spend reading these in order. I did, and I am quite glad of the experience. I strongly recommend her work in total. 

If you’ve read Swimming with Big Fish, the previous book, get this one as well and prepare yourself to properly enjoy Fatima Downunder (the third book of the larger story).

This review was first published in FlaxFlower reviews, which focuses on in-depth reviews of New Zealand books of all kinds, and is reprinted here with the kind permission of Flaxflower founder and editor Bronwyn Elsmore.