Drowning Is Inevitable
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4.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"A literary knockout with the loudest of beating hearts."
John Corey Whaley, Printz Award winner of Where Things Come Back
Olivia has spent her whole life struggling to escape her dead mother’s shadow. But when her father can’t even look at her because Olivia reminds him of her mother, and her grandmother mistakenly calls her “Lillian,” shaking a reputation she didn’t ask for is next to impossible. Olivia is used to leaning on her best friend, Jamie; her handsome but hot-tempered boyfriend, Max; and their wild-child friend, Maggie, for the reality check that her small Louisiana town can’t provide. But when a terrible fight between Jamie and his father turns deadly, all Olivia can think to do is grab her friends and run.
In a flash, Olivia, Jamie, Max, and Maggie become fugitives on the back roads of Louisiana. They’re headed to New Orleans, where they hope to find a solution to an unfixable problem. But with their faces displayed on all the news stations, their journey becomes a harrowing game of hide-and-seek from the police—and so-called allies, who just might be the real enemy.
Shalanda Stanley’s breathtaking debut novel explores the deep ties between legacy, loyalty, and love, even as it asks the question: How far would you go to save a friend?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
Drowning is Inevitable
I LOVED THIS BOOK!!! Brought me to tears and i couldn’t put it down! Broke my heart in the ending.