Breath Like Water by Anna Jarzab
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Thank you to the publisher, Inkyard Press, for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
I read most of the book in one day, staying up until 2 o’clock in the morning just to finish it. It wasn’t because I was so hooked on the story, instead I kept seeing all this potential and held out hope that the story might improve or at least find its centre.
I checked out a few other reviews in this story and I must warn you, this is going to be a very unpopular opinion coming your way.
According to these said reviews there was all this stuff that was still meant to happen before the story came to a conclusion and I waited patiently (I know, very uncharacteristic of me) to see where the author was taking this story and me as a reader.
I can confirm that yes, a lot happens and that is exactly one of the issues I had with it; too much is going on. More on that a little later.
For now, I need to try and focus on making sense of the characters, at least enough to bring my opinion across in a relatively coherent and intelligible way.
I didn’t get the protagonist. Creatively speaking, she contradicted her own personality traits and characteristics. Speaking as a reader, I have to admit it was impossible to relate to her at all. And I tried…for 400 pages.
She was rude, selfish, self-centred, a control freak and a mess that couldn’t see past her own nose.
All of these are fine to have in a character, but I suspect that the reader was supposed to feel for her and with her. I couldn’t do that. There was not even one remotely redeemable quality that could have enticed me to do so. And, again, I tried.
There are stories that have unlikeable characters, but there are meant to be unlikeable and the reader gets to see their struggle (the typical person vs themselves plot) that has us slowly root for this character, feel for them and with them, hoping they could make the changes they want to make in order to better their lives.
Not in this one. Plus, I wasn’t quite sure what most of the secondary characters were supposed to accomplish in relation to the protagonist.
None of them were ever allowed to get close to the protagonist, except for one, you’ll get to read a lot about that particular character.
There were no real bonds, nothing that made the protagonist seem human. I think I know why the author chose to do so; it just didn’t work very well.
Moving on, because I can go on forever, the narration was just too much. It was narrated in the first-person view, which is fine, it’s meant to give the reader greater insights into the protagonist’s mind and emotions, but in this case, it was too much.
Again, it accomplished the exact opposite of what it was meant to accomplish. We were supposed to get close to the protagonist, but the narration was so convoluted that it became tiresome and tedious to read. Every single scene had a very long description of how the protagonist felt and what she thought. Too much.
Also, the narrative style was much more mature than the protagonist was. It clashed and gave the illusion the one narrating wasn’t actually the one present in the story. It felt off.
As I said in the beginning, this had a lot of potential. I appreciated sensitive and difficult issues being addressed in a young adult novel, but there were so many of them.
The story tried to wear too many hats, tried to address too many issues at once and it got messy and tiresome to follow. I know, in real life we have to deal with a whole bunch of issues at once, too, but for the purpose of story writing it isn’t the best approach.
The story gets clogged up and loses itself and at the end I wasn’t even sure what I had been reading any more.
Overall, there was enough potential to make this a wonderful, raw, gritty and powerful young adult story, but it lost itself along the way. As I said, there were some issues that I appreciated having been addressed and for that I’m giving this book an extra star in my rating. I just wished the author could have decided on a few and really go with them.
Sadly, this one wasn’t for me.
About the Author
Anna Jarzab is a Midwesterner turned New Yorker. She lives and works in New York City and is the author of such books as Red Dirt, All Unquiet Things, The Opposite of Hallelujah, and the Many-Worlds series. Visit her online at annajarzab.com and on Twitter, @ajarzab.
