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Susannah Ramos is a swimmer, and not just a standout in her high school — she became world champion at the tender age of 14. So her life isn’t the typical high school student’s: She gets up early, goes to the pool to swim, attends classes and does her schoolwork, and then practices and trains more, weekends included. She hasn’t really dated and certainly never had a boyfriend; there simply isn’t time, and boys aren’t worth even the possibility of losing out on her dream of making it onto the Olympic team.
But two years after her world triumph, she’s added inches and pounds and is still trying to adjust to a different body, and her often-demeaning longtime coach seems to have written her off. Susannah is frustrated but determined, working ever harder to make her body into a machine capable of getting her to the Olympics and proving to her coach that she’s still worth his time.
Then a new boy shows up at her swim club, transferring in from a different one, and he somehow manages to catch her attention. Harry is handsome, sure, but he works hard to get past her defenses to get to know her, and as Susannah realizes he understands her, she can’t help but fall for him. The two have a deep connection, and they spend any spare time they have together.
But Harry has some defenses of his own for an ongoing challenge he faces, and Susannah is trying to figure out whether she wants to try a different approach to training with a new assistant coach at her club. The stakes are high for these two young people, and they face more than the usual heartbreak common in adolescence. There’s a lot on the line: physical and mental health, beating the odds to achieve dreams beyond what most people even imagine, future schooling and careers.
Breath Like Water is an intense dive into a life of competition, laser focus and dedication few people will ever experience. Focusing solely on one activity and giving so much of your life to it means much of “normal” life others experience simply falls by the wayside. But it does mean for a select few the opportunity to reach heights others will never know or fathom. These characters are striving for greatness, but Susannah also is acutely aware that as a Mexican, she is still truly a minority in the world of high-level competitive swimming, and she has to work harder. Harry has talent and has worked hard but has an illness he’ll have to deal with his whole life and that supersedes his swimming or any of his “normal” life sometimes. And while the two have something special together, their relationship may not be able to sustain them at their age and stage of life and with the challenges they face.
I enjoyed the book and appreciated the view into what that kind of competitive life is like, with all its pros and cons and trade-offs; I felt deeply for the characters and hoped for the best for them even while knowing they were invariably going to have some deep disappointments and small chances for “success,” depending on how that would be defined. I appreciated the window into mental illness that Harry’s story provided, with all its complexity. Anna Jarzab wove a lot into one book that is meaningful and worth exploring.
Rated: High, for more than two dozen instances of strong language; occasional references to characters talking about sex; the two main characters having sex, with some moderate amount of detail but the scene being fairly brief; a coach who frequently berates, belittles, and curses at his swimmers.
* I received an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.
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