Drowning Is Inevitable

Seventeen-year-old Olivia has always existed in her drowned mother’s shadow: living in her mother’s bedroom-turned-shrine, wearing her clothes, saving mementos of her, acting reckless like her, letting her senile grandmother call her by her mother’s name, and waiting for her 18th birthday when she’ll surpass her mother’s age when she died. Fortunately she has her boyfriend, Max, and friends Jamie and Maggie, who understand her thanks to the unhappy parts of their own lives. After a deadly altercation with Jamie’s drunken father, the foursome panic, flee their Louisiana town, and hide from the police in New Orleans. Olivia would do anything to protect Jamie, but their plan leads down a path she cannot save him from, though she does find a way to restart her own life. Told from Olivia’s insightful point of view, debut author Stanley’s novel about loss and unconditional friendship suffers from an overdramatic plot. While the story is moving and ambitious, Stanley doesn’t believably tie the novel’s two main story threads together, and it further digresses with an extended stay in a crack house and a drug deal gone bad. Ages 14–up. Agent: Kate McKean, Howard Morhaim Literary Agency. (Sept.)