Her father, a doctor, just works more and her mother paints and drinks. It’s something I’ve come to call privately the kaleidoscope pf crazy- shimmering and beautiful in certain lights, paisley and horrifying in others.” They spend hours on the roof of their house smoking and talking, but Katie can always sense “his emotional axis shifting a little, off-kilter. At the beginning of the novel Katie seems to almost idolize her brother. The characterization is all over the place, too. Breathless ends up cramming every possible teenage trope into its 331 pages: friendship, drinking, religion, sex, drugs, wealth, first love, jealousy, mean girls and damaged girls etc etc. When her brother, Will, goes off the deep end again, Katie’s parents make the decision to send her off to boarding school. The novel is apparently semi-autobiographical and tells the story of Katie Kitrell, a fifteen-year-old championship swimmer with an alcoholic mother, workaholic father and psychopathic older brother. All I can say is that I kept reading for her because there’s really nothing to recommend this book.īreathless was written when Warman herself was just out of high school and sadly, that’s how it reads. A few months back I read Jessica Warman’s novel, Between, and although I didn’t love it straight off it definitely grew on me. A student in my writing class saw Breathless on my bookshelf and told me that I had to read it next.
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