She is questioned by a detective who provides her with a tape recorder and instructs her to tell her story. When we first meet Jenna, she is in the hospital, frozen and wet, having been pulled from the lake. This is just one of the many insightful passages featured in Drowning Instinct, but it is one that will stick with me forever, as will Jenna's story. Most often, you don't because the body protects and the skin hides, so drowning doesn't look like drowning and some people scar so nicely. tissues and/or something super sappy and happy to help you recover afterwards.Įverybody breaks sooner or later, Bob. Do not read it without due preparation: i.e. Then, when I would step back and think about it, I had to face the fact that things may not be what they seem at all.įans of Laurie Halse Anderson or Patricia McCormick will love undoubtedly love this book. I got completely sucked into her story and to seeing from her point of view. Such realizations can be just as mind-blowing as reading through the book itself is. It's hard to know how much of what she believes to be true is actually true. For one thing, Jenna is not an especially reliable narrator. Bick does an amazing job of highlighting the difficulties of understanding such a case. At the outset, you don't know what's going on exactly, but you definitely have your suspicions and you're pretty sure it's bad. Obviously, this too is a completely dark and forbidden thing. The main plot is about Jenna's relationship with an older man, her science teacher Mr. The awfulness just keeps on rolling I only wish that there were not people out there who have likely actually lived lives like Jenna's. So yeah, going into it you know her family's a mess and that she is too, but you don't know the full extent of it. She's spent a year in an institution, put there after it was discovered that she'd been cutting. Like Anderson, she also focuses on teens, on the bad stuff - not the shiny vampires and the sweet first loves. She clearly has no problem plumbing the darkest and most terrifying of human emotions. Bick will come to be recognized alongside authors like Laurie Halse Anderson. What an incredibly dark and well-done novel.

Drowning instinct by ilsa j bick