Surfacing
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- €4.49
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- €4.49
Publisher Description
Though only in year ten, Maggie Paris is a star on the school swimming team. She also has an uncanny, almost magical ability to draw out people’s deepest truths, even when they don’t intend to share them. It’s reached a point where most of her classmates, all except her best friend, now avoid her, and she’s taken to giving herself away every chance she gets to an unavailable – and ungrateful – popular boy from the wrestling team, just to prove she still exists. Even Maggie's parents seem wary of her as the deep secret at the heart of their devastated family slowly unravels and Maggie learns a further truth about the circumstances surrounding her sister's death. A lyrical and deeply moving portrait of grief, blame and forgiveness, and of finding the courage to confront your ghosts – one truth at a time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
From the perspective of sophomore Maggie Paris with occasional interludes from the spirit of her sister, Leah, who drowned at age nine Baskin (All We Know of Love) writes an unsettling novel that shows the impact of guilt and childhood trauma. Maggie is an excellent swimmer, a top contender on her school's team, and people she barely knows tend to confide in her ("Maggie knew, even if no one else understood, that this kind of intimacy made people resent her"). Haunted by regret over not being able to save Leah's life, Maggie feels distant from others and is reluctant to build a solid relationship with a boy who is interested in her. Maggie is a sympathetic, psychologically complex heroine; her self-destructive impulses, coupled with recurring reminders of loss and death (including flashbacks to her sister's accident), create a bleak atmosphere. The passages from Maggie's sister, presented as a collection of memories, cast the family's vision of Leah in an intriguing new light, but are only peripherally related to Maggie's immediate concerns. Ages 14 up.
