{"id":6218,"date":"2026-08-20T23:34:40","date_gmt":"2026-08-20T23:34:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.ackgame.com\/onwords\/?p=6218"},"modified":"2026-08-20T23:34:40","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T23:34:40","slug":"lifeguard-a-love-story-by-janet-fash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.ackgame.com\/onwords\/lifeguard-a-love-story-by-janet-fash\/","title":{"rendered":"<B>Lifeguard: A love story<\/B> by Janet Fash"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a style=\"float: left; padding-right: 20px;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/242978591-lifeguard\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.gr-assets.com\/images\/S\/compressed.photo.goodreads.com\/books\/1760893666l\/242978591._SX98_.jpg\" alt=\"Lifeguard: A Love Story\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/242978591-lifeguard\">Lifeguard: A Love Story<\/a> by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/author\/show\/60866504.Janet_Fash\">Janet Fash<\/a><br \/>\nMy rating: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/review\/show\/8877480362\">2 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n<p>This book was very disappointing. From the title, cover picture, and brief library description, I had thought this would be about saving lives, love for the ocean, and things of that nature. There was some of that. But about 80% of the books is about the corruption in New York City Lifeguard program and one man in particular. The union boss for the lifeguards, a man named Stein, ran the whole program like a fiefdom, rewarding his friends and cronies with jobs and promotions and taking vengeance on anyone who crossed him. The author, a thorn in his side but somewhat safe from his wrath since she was the city&#8217;s first female chief lifeguard, essentially wrote an expos\u00e9. I really wasn&#8217;t interested in that and I think there was some misrepresentation as to content by the publisher. It was upsetting to see corruption spelled out. In addition, the writing wasn&#8217;t very good. It wasn&#8217;t terrible, but the author was fast and loose with grammar at times (&#8220;Me and Bob went &#8230;&#8221;) and she confesses to needing a ghostwriter (or cowriter), Clio Chang, for her &#8220;writing abilities.&#8221; This is disturbing since the author was a teacher during the off season. I hope she didn&#8217;t teach English. But worst of all was her casual attitude toward drinking and drug use. She writes about how much fun it was as a teenage lifeguard to get drunk every night and come in to work hungover. She even seemed to look the other way toward cocaine use by other lifeguards like it was just boys being boys. In my view anyone who gets drunk regularly is not qualified to hold any job that involves the responsibility for the lives of others. This behavior seemed to persist even into her adult years. I finally had to start skipping liberally in the last third of the book.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/review\/list\/12975428-russell-atkinson\">View all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lifeguard: A Love Story by Janet Fash My rating: 2 of 5 stars This book was very disappointing. From the title, cover picture, and brief library description, I had thought this would be about saving lives, love for the ocean, and things of that nature. There was some of that. But about 80% of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Lifeguard: A love story by Janet Fash - OnWords<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.ackgame.com\/onwords\/lifeguard-a-love-story-by-janet-fash\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Lifeguard: A love story by Janet Fash - OnWords\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Lifeguard: A Love Story by Janet Fash My rating: 2 of 5 stars This book was very disappointing. 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