How It Feels to Float - Softcover

Fox, Helena

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593625021 ISBN 13: 9780593625026

Verlag: Dial Books for Young Readers, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

"Profoundly moving . . . Will take your breath away." —Kathleen Glasgow, author of Girl in Pieces

"Give this to all your friends immediately . . . It tackles mental health, depression, sexual identity, and anxiety with beauty and empathy." —Cosmopolitan.com

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year
A Chicago Public Library Best of the Best of the Year

Biz knows how to float, right there on the surface—normal okay regular fine. She has her friends, her mom, the twins. She has Grace. And she has her dad, who shouldn't be here but is. So Biz doesn't tell anyone anything—not about her dark, runaway thoughts, not about kissing Grace or noticing Jasper, the new boy. And not about seeing her dad. Because her dad died when she was seven.

But after what happens on the beach, the tethers that hold Biz steady come undone. Her dad disappears and, with him, all comfort. It might be easier, better, sweeter to float all the way away? Or maybe stay a little longer, find her father, bring him back to her. Or maybe—maybe maybe maybe—there's a third way Biz just can't see yet.

Debut author Helena Fox tells a story about love, grief, and inter-generational mental illness, exploring the hard and beautiful places loss can take us, and honoring those who hold us tightly when the current wants to tug us out to sea.

"I haven't been so dazzled by a YA in ages." —Jandy Nelson, author of I'll Give You the Sun (via SLJ)
"Mesmerizing and timely." —Bustle
"Nothing short of exquisite." —PopSugar
"Immensely satisfying" —Girls' Life
* "Lyrical and profoundly affecting." —Kirkus (starred review)
* "Masterful...Just beautiful." —Booklist (starred review)
* "Intimate...Unexpected." —PW (starred review)
* "Fox writes with superb understanding and tenderness." —BCCB (starred review)
* "Frank [and] beautifully crafted." —BookPage (starred review)
"Deeply moving...A story of hope." —Common Sense Media
"This book will explode you into atoms." —Margo Lanagan, author of Tender Morsels
"Helena Fox's novel delivers. Read it." —Cath Crowley, author of Words in Deep Blue
"This is not a book; it is a work of art." —Kerry Kletter, author of The First Time She Drowned
"Perfect...Readers will be deeply moved." —Books+Publishing

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Helena Fox lives in Wollongong, Australia, where she runs creative writing workshops for young people. She's a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. How It Feels to Float is her debut novel. She can be found at www.helenafoxauthor.com

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

At three in the morning when I can’t sleep, the room ticks over in the dark and all I have for company is the rush of words coming up fast like those racehorses you see on television, poor things, and when their hearts give out they are laid on the ground and shot dead behind a blue sheet.

At three a.m., I think of hearts. I think of candy hearts and carved-tree hearts and hummingbird hearts. I think of hearts in bodies and the rhythm inside us we don’t get to choose. 

I lay my hand over mine. There it is. 

It beatbeats beatbeatbeats skipsabeatbeatbeat 

beatbeatbeats.

A heart is a mystery and not a mystery. It hides under ribs, pumping blood. You can pull it out, hold it in your hand.Squeeze. It wants what it wants. It can be made of gold, glass, stone. It can stop anytime.

People scratch hearts into benches, draw them onto fogged windows, tattoo them on their skin. Believe the story they tell themselves: that hearts are somehow bigger than muscle, that we are something more than an accidental arrangement of molecules, that we are pulled by a force greater than gravity, that love is anything more than a mess of nerve and impulse—

“Biz.”

A whisper.

“Biz.”

In the dark.

“Biz.” 

In my room.

I open my eyes, and Dad’s sitting on the edge of the bed.

“You need to stop,” he says. 

What? I squint at him. He’s blurry.

“The thinking. I can hear it when you breathe.”

Dad’s wearing a gray sweatshirt. His hands are folded in his lap. He looks tired.

“You should sleep like you did when you were small,” he says. He looks away, smiles. “Your tiny fingers, tucked under your chin. There’s a photo . . .” Dad trails off.

Yeah, Dad. I’ve seen it.

“The one of us in hospital, after you were born—” 

Yeah. The one just after Mum got her new blood and you fainted and they gave you orange juice. The one where Mum’s laughing up at the camera as I sleep in her arms. Yeah. I’ve seen it.

Dad smiles again. He reaches across to touch me, but of course he can’t. 

That photo has been on every fridge door in every house I’ve ever lived in. It sits under a plumbing company magnet and beside a clip holding year-old receipts Mum can’t seem to throw away.

The photo was taken an hour after I came bulleting out of Mum so fast she had to have a transfusion. In the picture, I look like a slug and Dad looks flattened, like he’s seen a car accident. But Mum’s face is bright, open, happy.

All the other photos are in albums on our living room bookshelf, next to the non-working fireplace. The albums hold every picture of me Dad ever took until he died, and all the ones of me Mum took until smartphones came along and she stopped printing me onto paper. I’m now partly inside a frozen computer Mum keeps meaning to get fixed, and on an overcrowded iPhone she keeps meaning to download. 

And I’m in the photos friends have taken when I’ve let them and the ones the twins have taken with their eyes since they were babies. I’m in the ocean I walk beside when I skip school and in the clouds where I imagine myself sometimes. And I’m in the look on my friend Grace’s face, a second after I kissed her, five seconds before she said she thought of me as a friend. 

I blink. Dad’s gone again. The room is empty but for me, my bed, my walls, my thoughts, my things.

It’s what—four in the morning? 

I have a physics test at eight. 

My ribs hurt. Behind them, my heart beatbeats beatbeatbeats beatskipsabeat 

beatbeat beats. 

 

 

My name is Elizabeth Martin Grey, but no one I love calls me that. 

The Martin is for Dad’s dad who died in a farm accident when he was thirty and Dad was ten.

I was seven when Dad died. Which means I had less time with Dad alive than Dad had with his.

There’s never enough time. Actually, there’s too much and too little, in unequal parts. More than enough of time passing but not enough of the time passed. 

Right?

Ratio of the time you want versus the time you get (a rough estimate)—

1 : 20,000. 

Ratio of Dad’s time as the son of Martin : as the living father of Biz : as my dead dad, sitting on the edge of my bed telling me stories—

1 : 0.7 : ∞.

 

 

Monday morning, 7:30, and it’s so hot the house feels like it’s melting. Cicadas scream through the windows. The dog pants on the kitchen floor. I had a shower five minutes ago and already I’m sweating through my shirt. 

“Ugh,” I say, flopping over the kitchen counter, crumpled uniform on, shoes untied. 

Mum reads my face and sighs. She’s making breakfast for the twins. “Be grateful you get to have an education, Biz.” She waggles a spatula. “Not everyone’s as lucky.”

I peer at her. “You might have read me wrong, Mum. Maybe I meant, ‘Ugh. How I wish school lasted all weekend, I have missed it so very much.’?”

I’m a month into Year 11, which is ridiculous because I am nano and unformed but I’m still supposed to write essays about Lenin and Richard III and urban sprawl. Year 11 is a big deal. We are only seconds away, the teachers say, from our final exams. The teachers can’t stop revving us up about our impending future. 

This is a big deal! say the teachers of English, science, art, maths, music, geography, and Other Important Subjects in Which We Are Not Remotely Interested But Are Taking So We Can Get a Good Mark. 

You need to take it seriously! 

You need to be prepared! 

You need to not freak out, then have to go to the counselor because we’ve freaked you out! 

I open the fridge. “I’m going to sit in here, okay? Just for a minute. Let me squat next to the broccoli.”

Mum laughs. She’s making banana pancakes. Billie and Dart drool over their waiting plates. The twins have the morning off school. They’re going to the dentist! They love the dentist—it’s where Mum works, so they get extra toothbrushes, and as many little packs of floss and toothpaste as they can carry in their hands. 

“Are they ready yet?” says my brother, Dart, six years old.

“Come on, Mum! I’m starving todeath,” says my sister, Billie, nineteen minutes younger than Dart.

“Give me a second,” says Mum. “A watched pancake never boils.”

She flips one over. It looks scorched. Mum doesn’t love cooking.

I can’t see how she can be anywhere near a stove in this heat. I grab some coconut yogurt and grapes out of the fridge.

“Did you study for your test?” Mum says. 

“Absolutely,” I say, and it’s true, if you count watching YouTube videos and listening to music while reading the textbook studying. I don’t know if I’m ready—there’s the lack of sleep thing, and the not-having-spoken-properly-to-Grace-since-I-kissed-her thing, which makes today impossible and complicated before it even begins. 

I hug Mum goodbye and smooch the twins’ cheeks as they squirm. 

I grab my bike from the shed, ride it for thirty seconds before I realize the front tire is flat. 

Ah, that’s right. 

When did the tire...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Dial Books for Young Readers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593625021
• ISBN 13: 9780593625026
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 370
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar