Product Description

‘How to Breathe Underwater' is an outstanding collection. Orringer writes about the things that everyone writes about – youth, friendship, death, grief, etc – but her narrative settings are fresh and wonderfully knotty. So while her themes are as solid and as recognizable as oak trees, the stuff growing on the bark you’ve never seen before… The moment I finished it I bought myself a first edition, and then another. It’s that sort of book.’ Nick Hornby, The Believer Magazine

Julie Orringer’s dazzling first book is less a story collection than a guide to life in a hostile world. In ‘The Isabel Fish’ fourteen-year-old Maddy attempts not to drown in the scuba-diving class at the local swimming pool, while her brother Sage painfully confronts the loss of his first girlfriend. ‘Note to Sixth-Grade Self’ follows a young girl through the social maelstrom of school, its desperate humiliations and its gentle surprises. In ‘Care’ a young woman shows us just how many wrong ways there are to take care of a six-year-old on a hot day by the sea, and in ‘Stations of the Cross’ a mother-to-be looks back with regret on the cruelty she exercised against a mixed race boy in their Louisiana neighbourhood.

Julie Orringer’s characters struggle mightily against the engulfing forces that threaten to overtake us all. In stories that sing with compassion and humanity, all of them finally learn, gloriously if at great cost, how to breathe underwater.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #112268 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Nick Hornby
‘Outstanding’

Daily Telegraph
'An amazing debut. Conjures the same exhilaration I felt on reading Melissa Bank’s The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing’

Synopsis
In her dazzling first book Julie Orringer dives into the private world of childhood and immerses us in its fears and longings: the jealous friendships and the bitter sibling battles; the parents that row and the boys that won't dance with you. Then, in a voice that is equally tender and compassionate, she reminds us of those rare, exhilarating moments of victory. 'Unbelievably good: the humiliations and cruelties and passions of childhood, sparkling fresh prose, a writer with a big heart and an acute sense of the small things that loom large in our lives' Monica Ali, Guardian

Customer Reviews

Childhood Traumas
An extraordinary collection of short stories filled with tragedies and traumas that the book's young characters endure, such as tales of a drowning, a premature baby and a cancer sufferer. They make for quite a disturbing read but are very well written and will definitely stay with the reader. This book is packed with emotion and even though the subject matter isn't light-hearted it is superbly written.

Much more than a collection of embarrassing moments....
Whatever you want to call it: teenage rebellion, sibling rivalry, first love, growing pains.... it is a popular source for American literature (films, songs, etc.). These stories are tinged with a deeper theme of death which gives then a poignancy and a touch of horror. In some, religion has a baring - it too acts as a weight of constraints and expectations. To my reckoning only one of the stories has a happy ending - there is none of the resolution or acceptance (or forgetting) that time might bring.

The stories are all immediate and raw, and to some extent compelling. The writing is great, an excellent portrayal of American youth with something on its mind. Bit it is hard to draw any conclusion, other than a negative one - the more minutely you examine this subject, the more intensely painful it looms!

So glad it found me!
I probably wouldn't have bought this had I known it was a short story collection but I'm SO glad I did.

As with any short story collection, there are highlights and lowlights, but in this one there are very few lowlights and the vast majority of the stories are 4 and 5-star reads.

Highly recommended.