Surfacing

January 21, 2013
From the perspective of sophomore Maggie Paris—with occasional interludes from the spirit of her sister, Leah, who drowned at age nine—Baskin (All We Know of Love) writes an unsettling novel that shows the impact of guilt and childhood trauma. Maggie is an excellent swimmer, a top contender on her school’s team, and people she barely knows tend to confide in her (“Maggie knew, even if no one else understood, that this kind of intimacy made people resent her”). Haunted by regret over not being able to save Leah’s life, Maggie feels distant from others and is reluctant to build a solid relationship with a boy who is interested in her. Maggie is a sympathetic, psychologically complex heroine; her self-destructive impulses, coupled with recurring reminders of loss and death (including flashbacks to her sister’s accident), create a bleak atmosphere. The passages from Maggie’s sister, presented as a collection of memories, cast the family’s vision of Leah in an intriguing new light, but are only peripherally related to Maggie’s immediate concerns. Ages 14–up. Agent: Nancy Gallt Literary Agency.

July 1, 2013

Gr 9 Up-Maggie's sister, Leah, died when she was a child, and Maggie has never forgiven herself for not being able to save her from drowning. This event contributes to her low self-esteem, which leads her to engage in self-destructive behavior with an older boy who uses her for sex. Readers may be drawn in by the mystery surrounding Leah's death, but the shallow characterizations will put off those looking for a well-developed story. Water is used effectively as a metaphor, and Baskin is able to create a somber mood as anguish permeates the story. However, the third-person narration never allows readers to get close enough to Maggie, and Leah's interjections from beyond the grave can be jarring. Maggie's belief that she has a special power that forces others to confide in her also misses the mark in this story about grief and redemption. The sexual content is not graphic, but the lack of resolution by the novel's end is unsettling.-Carrie Shaurette, Dwight-Englewood School, Englewood, NJ

Copyright 2013 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2012
When Leah was 9 and Maggie 5, the sisters made a forbidden trip to the condo pool, where Leah drowned. Now 15 and a swim-team star, Maggie interprets her world, her worth and her choices through the prism of that loss. Loner Maggie has one loyal friend, Julie, and acquires another in Nathan, the boy she's drawn into her life for reasons she can't explain. (Maggie's abrupt, often self-destructive choices may puzzle readers.) With heartbreaking clarity, Baskin limns a family tragedy that's marked each member, showing how, for even the youngest, grief and loss can scab over into guilt and blame. Leah's death even haunts Maggie's twin brothers, born years later. Water, the all-purpose metaphor, serves the tale well, but other tropes are less successful, like Maggie's unwanted, near-magical power to draw deeply personal confessions from others. In encounters with these undervalued characters (their only role to confess), Maggie's indifference to their pain casts her in a harsh light. Throughout, Leah makes ghostly appearances, describing the motivations that led to her drowning with unvarnished honesty. Yet her voice also sounds a quasi-fantastic note that undermines the story's closely observed, lyrical realism. At once frustrating and deeply moving, this ambitious novel comes tantalizingly close to getting it right. (Fiction. 14 & up)

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March 15, 2013
Grades 9-12 In this uneven but expressive novel, sophomore Maggie is one of her school's star swimmers, on the road to the state finals, but she is haunted by the drowning death of her older sister, Leah, 10 years ago. Though she has an unexplained quasi-paranormal power to compel intimate confessions from others, she is unable to express her own grief and guilt over her inability to save her sister. Distanced from others, including her bickering parents, Maggie makes punishing self-destructive choices over two boysone of whom is using her, while the other genuinely caresbefore she can brave her true feelings. This often bleak but frequently powerful novel gets it right when portraying the lingering effects of a child's death on the family, and Baskin effectively uses a water metaphor to underscore emotional moments. Narrative interludes from ghost Leah fill in details of that fateful day but are otherwise distractingly tangential to Maggie's story. The lack of closure at the abrupt end is perhaps frustrating but realistic.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

July 1, 2013
People feel compelled to share their secrets with Maggie, and she has one of her own: she helplessly watched her sister drown. Coping with her ability (and her secret) is hard enough; now her parents are getting divorced. Chapters alternate between past and present, and the third person narration occasionally, and eerily, shifts to the dead sister's perspective. Maggie's gift/curse goes unexplained, which detracts from the story.

(Copyright 2013 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)