Book Review: How It Feels To Float
Helena Fox is effortlessly ambitious with How it Feels to Float. She sweeps us into the world of Biz, an Australian teen whose thoughts fall haphazardly into readers' hands: shards so confused and hurried you can’t help but think they’re meaningless. But as you read on, and Fox patiently waits for you to place the shards together: you find yourself standing in front of a stunning mosaic confused as to how you got there and yet sure that this is how things were supposed to come together.
Biz is a Year 12 Student who just kissed her best friend Grace, keeps seeing ghostly apparitions of her deceased dad, and is starting to hear the photos around her talk back to her, which, as a sentence, sounds overwhelming. And it is. But the beauty of Fox’s style is that despite this complex web Biz finds herself entangled in, the audience never feels as though this premise is an attempt to confront the audience: it’s the photo-realistic life of a teenage girl.
Biz narrates directly to the audience, but in stark contrast to YA literature’s tried and true sassy, relatable internal monologue, Fox has the uncanny ability to replicate the distracted thoughts a real teenager would really have. Biz floats away from the audience, her thoughts drifting as she’s distracted by a science test only for her to crash back down on us as she recounts her interactions with her late father.
This is by no means an easy read, and I mean that in the best of ways. It’s heavy. A word tossed around frequently in our culture, but truly, this book weighs on you. If you’ve got enough on your shoulders, and the themes of anxiety, suicidal ideation, depression, bullying, PTSD and sexual assault make that load heavier to carry, please be kind to yourself.
How it Feels to Float is painfully relatable, terrifyingly accurate and a brilliant read.
SCWC 2023 Young Book Reviewer: Violet Fitzsimons
As a fifteen-year-old highschool student, I have travelled extensively from the couch to the fridge. I live in Bowral NSW with my parents and loving/hating sister, as well as our dog Henry who is by far the favourite child. Due to my lack of a social life, I have won numerous writing awards. In 2022 I received the Silver Award in the Queen’s Commonwealth Writing Contest, won the Cambridge International Relations Essay Writing Scholarship, was shortlisted for The Whitlam Institute What Matters Writing Prize and got an A on my To Kill a Mockingbird essay in English.