Learning Not to Drown by Anna Shinoda (review)

Clare’s family has an open secret: her older brother is a violent addict who has been in and out of jail since Clare was five. Clare has compensated by being as perfect as possible, getting good grades, knitting blankets for the homeless, saving for college, and rarely breaking her mother’s strict rules, and she’s determined to remember her brother as a good guy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. However, when her brother comes home this time, she starts to see him with new eyes, particularly when he gets in trouble again and her mother tries to protect him at Clare’s expense. A dramatic partial memory opens the book, immediately followed by Clare’s description of the skeleton that appears before her in times of stress; what unfolds, however, is not the horror story these tropes suggest but a searching tale of a family torn apart by the addictions and criminal activities of one member. The mother and father are psychologically if maddeningly credible in their denial of the extent of their son’s problems, and Clare’s dawning understanding of how their cover-ups have allowed many people, including herself and her other brother, to be hurt is painful to read. Ultimately, Clare has to come to terms with the fact that no amount of compassion and forgiveness on her part can change her brother, and that her responsibility must be to herself first; that she gradually realizes this through experience rather than through adult supports and guidance relieves the book of any message-y pretense. Instead, there is a subtle coming-of-age arc where she offers to a young boy the kind of tacit compassion that she wishes she had received from her own family, paying forward the good her brother showed her before he went bad.