The Floating Girls
A Novel
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1.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
A marsh girl with secrets. A Southern summer soaked in mystery. A story as haunting as the marsh itself.
Twelve-year-old Kay Whitaker sees more than the adults around her want to admit. Life in the heat-heavy swamps of Bledsoe, Georgia, is always complicated—especially when your family is barely holding itself together. Her mother’s attention is fading. Her father’s warnings are sharp. And the weight of being the only girl in a house of boys feels heavier by the day.
Then a stilt house appears across the creek. And with it, a boy named Andy Webber—quiet, strange, and followed by whispers about his mother’s suspicious drowning. Despite her father’s firm warning to stay away, Kay can’t resist him—or the mystery surrounding his family. But when her own sister disappears without explanation, Kay’s search for answers unearths more than she’s ready to face.
As old rumors resurface and long-buried truths rise with the tide, Kay finds herself navigating a world of adult secrets, fractured loyalties, and a community quick to bury its past. What she uncovers will test her courage, her voice, and the very meaning of family.
Told from a perspective both fierce and fragile, The Floating Girls is a Southern Gothic coming-of-age thriller that blends lyrical prose with emotional suspense. Lo Patrick’s debut is an atmospheric masterpiece about the price of truth, the ache of growing up, and the enduring pull of the past.
Praise for The Floating Girls:
★ A Publishers Weekly Starred Review
★ Townsend Prize finalist
“A powerhouse of a Southern novel. At once a poignant coming-of-age tale, a murder mystery, and an evocative tribute to the marshlands of Georgia. Lo Patrick is a standout new Southern voice." ―Andrea Bobotis, author of The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt
“Kay is the smartest, funniest, most curious young narrator I have come across in some time.” —Tiffany Quay Tyson, author of The Past is Never
"Fans of Where the Crawdads Sing will love this immersive mystery set against the salty air of Georgia's marshes." ― Lindsey Rogers Cook, author of Learning to Speak Southern
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Both comic and heartrending, Patrick's superb debut sets a bildungsroman and murder mystery in the wetlands of coastal Georgia. Brash and lonely Kay Whitaker, 12, is frustrated by her unemployed father, Clay; her emotionally absent mother, Sue-Bess; and her remote older sister, Sarah-Anne, whose favorite activity Kay describes as "standin' in the yard like a twig in mud." While exploring the wetlands beyond their isolated home, Kay meets Andy Webber, a handsome boy her age who lives with his crabber father, Nile. Clay orders her to avoid the Webbers but won't explain why. Later, Kay discovers Nile was suspected in the drowning death of his wife a decade earlier. As Kay defies her father by jockeying for Andy's attention, unidentified authorities her parents refer to only as "people from the state" routinely visit the Whitaker home. (Her parents also hide Sarah-Anne during the visits.) Then Sarah-Anne disappears, and secrets begin to surface. The crackling energy of Kay's narration—a winning mixture of insight and naiveté, humor and pathos, vulnerability and strength—provides a welcome counterbalance to the oppressive setting and the pain the characters try to suppress. It's a masterly achievement.
