Surfacing by Nora Raleigh Baskin (review)

Two things define Maggie’s life: the drowning of her older sister, Leah, when Maggie was a little girl, and people’s mysterious urge to tell their deepest secrets to her. Now she’s a teenager, dealing with her water unease by becoming a champion swimmer, isolated by people’s quickly regretted intimacies, and aiming all her longing toward an older boy, Matthew. She’s so focused on Matthew that her relationship with kind and affectionate Nathan is mostly just a means to gaining the sexual experience she’s sure will finally allow her to win the approval that she craves from Matthew. Baskin limns her protagonist with quick, clear strokes; the third-person narration limits itself largely to Maggie’s own knowledge, so Maggie’s unawareness of her dysfunction is a plausible characteristic that leaves readers to extrapolate her feelings from her behavior. The eternal struggle of her relationship with Leah, whom Maggie experienced first as a bossy older sister and then as the silent, absent center of the family, is compellingly explored, and the interwoven flashbacks focalized through Leah add dimension. Unfortunately, they also enhance the choppiness of the episodic narrative, and the chronological skipping around makes it hard to get a fix on the emotional trajectory; as a result, the revelation of family secrets surrounding Leah’s death seems less conclusive than spontaneous. The relationships remain memorable, though, and it’s an affecting portrait of the extent of the aftershocks from a family tragedy.