February 14, 2010

• Interlude

  I promised myself that I would catch up on book reviews and reading this weekend.  It’s at least something I can DO since spring won’t come and my body is being painfully uncooperative -still.

  
  

  “It’s something I have come to call privately the kaleidoscope of crazy – shimmering and beautiful in certain lights, paisley and horrifying in others. …  I know him as well as myself and not at all.  All I can figure to do is hold on.  He is my only brother.”  After her brother Will attempts suicide in a very public way and not for the first time, Katie Kittrell is sent to boarding school to start a new life and do the only thing she feels she CAN do – swim.  Katie makes friends, keeps secrets, gets a boyfriend, loves her roommate, and generally behaves in a manner expected and acceptable to parents, peers and teachers.  But under the surface of her life is Will, always present, always there.  Katie loves him and hates him, holds on to him even as she tries to let go of him.  What moves this novel out of the realm of “typical teen angst/coming of age novel” is that love/hate relationship, the constant presence of Will in Katie’s life.  Warman does a brilliant job of drawing real characters and real situations.  Without sentimentality or saccharine she pulls the reader into Katie’s world and life.  It is only in the water that Katie can truly breathe.
  

  Every once in a while one of the kids gets their hands on a book before I do and insists, with an insistence that is both annoying and demanding that I read this book right now and follows it up with days of “Have you finished it yet?”  Sometimes they are right on the money and Courtney was with this one.  Breathless is Jessica Warman’s debut novel and a beautiful one it is. 

  • 8:28 am
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