The Pool

The problem is not that the pool doesn't work. The problem is that it works.

A fish holds its place in fast water. The current pushes. It hurts. So when the fish finds a pool of still water behind a rock, where the pull simply stops, it learns something it will not forget.

The Pool is a short illustrated fable about what we do when something hurts: the relief that saves us, the refuge that quietly becomes a world, and the years that pass inside it. It is a story about avoidance, about shame and the hiding that feeds it, and about the moment a fish returns to the edge of everything it left.

Written by a psychiatrist and rendered in spare ink by illustrator Amber Lim Shin, this is not a book of advice. It offers no steps and no lesson. It simply tells the truth about the pool, and trusts you to know your own.

For readers of The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse. For anyone who has ever found a still place and stayed too long. For the ones who are tired of guarding the entrance.