To Ella it seemed they could be relatives of her mother's, shameful cousins recently discovered." Shame is as omnipresent as water in this collection, sadly appropriate for stories about girls becoming women. In "Pilgrims," young Ella is taken to a hippie household for Thanksgiving, where her mother joins several other cancer patients in search of natural remedies: "Some of them wore knitted hats like her mother, their skin dull-gray, their eyes purple-shaded underneath.
The author possesses an uncanny ability to capture scenes and complex emotions in quick strokes.
A fall from a treehouse, an ailing mother, a near-drowning, a premature baby, a gun-each is the source of a young woman's coming-of-age, which we witness through Orringer's lovely, driving prose. The stories in How to Breathe Underwater, Julie Orringer's debut collection, swim with tragedies both commonplace and horrific.
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