Jenna Lord has already died three times in her short
life: twice by fire and now by ice. She’s
made it through all that to realize she may have nothing left to live for. She sits in the hospital telling her story
for the detective in the recorder he gave her.
But there’s a story and there’s the truth and sometimes people can’t
know which is which. There’s her teacher
that’s more than just her teacher, her brother that’s more like a ghost, her
parents that want to live a lie, and then there’s her. Telling this story is a bit like drowning. The
deeper she gets the more she struggles for air, and the more likely she is to
pull someone down with her.
Leave it to Bick to write a novel MORE depressing than
her book about a zombie apocalypse (Ashes YP FIC BICK). Then again, for us Kevin Brooks, Laurie
Halse Anderson, Ellen Hopkins, etc. fans, dark and depressing makes for the
best reads! This is a gut wrenchingly
tough read at times and it is certainly not for everyone. I really loved Jenna’s dark sarcastic voice
and found her compelling and real. The first person talking into a recorder
trick really works to make the book feel intimate and conspiratorial; since
this is a book about secrets and lies, it brings the novel to another level. Jenna
is a self-described ‘liar’ and even when she’s telling ‘the truth’ it’s her ‘truth’.
I highly recommend this to fans of very dark contemporary fiction, but be
aware: this book is dangerous*. The ‘relationship’ that develops between Jenna
and Mr. Anderson is presented entirely from Jenna’s POV and that’s where things
get tricky. Jenna doesn’t see this as a predator/victim relationship and we get
her point of view of falling in love with her adult teacher. That moral gray
area in something as absolutely inappropriate, immoral, unethical, and illegal
as the relationship actually is makes for very uncomfortable reading. However, Bick wants her readers uncomfortable
and packs enough sad and sick gut punch twists throughout the book that even
the most jaded of readers is going to eventually start to get involved in the
book on a real emotional level. The most
impressive thing is that this doesn’t feel crass and manipulative like it might
in the hands of a lesser writer. This is
my favorite feel-bad book of the summer!
I won’t say it was fun, I didn’t quite ‘enjoy’ it, but I’m glad to have
read it and I’ll be thinking about it for a long while.
*Lots of great fiction is dangerous, but it’s also not
for everyone.
You can check our catalog for Drowning Instinct here.
