How It Feels to Float

Literary fiction

Print length: 384 pagesPenguin Books, Limited, 2020

Description

Biz, an Australian teenager, moves through school and family life with the persistent sense that she might drift away from herself. Her father died when she was young, yet she still sees and speaks with him, an intimate presence that offers comfort while making the boundaries of grief and reality increasingly uncertain. Depression, dissociation, friendship, and questions about attraction gather around a crisis that leaves Biz isolated from the people and routines anchoring her. As she searches for language for what is happening, tentative new connections challenge her conviction that she must endure it alone. Written in lyrical, fractured prose, the novel stays close to a mind struggling to remain present without simplifying recovery into a straight path.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Fragmentary · Lyrical · Poetic

Pace

Measured

Tone

Hopeful · Intimate · Melancholic · Unsettling

Structure

Fragmented

Focus

Character · Relationships · Voice

Emotional intensity

5 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

FriendshipGriefIdentityIsolationMental healthSexuality

About Helena Fox

Helena Fox is an Australian young-adult novelist and poet whose fiction turns mental illness, grief, and trauma into close studies of perception without treating experience as literal autobiography. Her protagonists’ inner states become physical environments: floating and temporal slippage in How It Feels to Float, then noise, smoke, harbour water, and retreat in The Quiet and the Loud. Lyrical first-person narration lets past and present blur as memory and dissociation press against the present. Fox also uses protective silence as structure, delaying the source of trauma while readers inhabit a character’s evasions. Humor, tenderness, friendship, and community interrupt the intensity, and disclosure develops gradually as an act of self-advocacy rather than a simple cure.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Penguin Books, Limited
Language: English
ISBN: 9780525554363

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