Dryland
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- € 8,49
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- € 8,49
Beschrijving uitgever
A tender, meditative, and quietly kaleidoscopic novel about the 90's, queer adolescence, and swimming.
It's 1992 in Portland, Oregon. Fifteen-year-old Julie Winter moves through her days as if underwater - watching skaters through the constant rain, detached from her best friend's crushes, listening to the same B-side REM song on repeat. The rest of the world is caught up in the AIDS crisis, the war in Yugoslavia, and grunge. But to Julie it's all background.
No one at home talks about her older brother, a once-champion swimmer who could be living in Berlin, or could be anywhere. And although she spends her time searching for pictures of him in the pages of Swimmer's World magazine, she'd never considered swimming herself. Until Alexis, captain of the swimming team, tries to recruit her.
What starts as a flirtation and an infatuation becomes a chance to join in with the world, find out what really happened to her brother, or finally let him go.
Yearning, stifled, and sharp, Dryland is an anti-coming out novel that captures gauzy queer exploration at its quietest and its most loud.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jaffe's exceptional debut, a heartfelt coming-of-age story set in Portland, Ore., in 1992, exquisitely captures the nostalgia and heartbreak of youth. Teenage Julie Winter tries to make meaningful connections as she navigates the tricky world of high school cliques, while living in the shadow of her older brother, Jordan, a former Olympic hopeful now living in Germany. She and her friend Erika hang out together, dissecting every nuance of their peers' actions. Julie surreptitiously checks the swimming magazines at the local news store to see whether her noncommunicative brother has reentered the sport that once dominated the Winter family when he was an up-and-coming star. A radical shift occurs when the popular Alexis, cocaptain of the swim team, invites Julie to try out. Erika joins as well, and Julie feels both overwhelmed and at home in the water, coping with her brother's legacy yet wanting to make her own mark. A new relationship with one of her brother's fellow swimmers, Ben, now a freelance landscaper who also works as a magazine rep at her local store, provides her with some unexpected clues about Jordan's life. Using spare, precise prose, and with a fresh, strong voice, Jaffe explores Julie's budding sexuality, her unexpected attraction to Alexis, her awareness of the limitations of friendship, and the angst young women face as they begin to confront adulthood.
