HOW IT FEELS TO FLOAT BY HELENA FOX

How it Feels to Float by Helena Fox is short listed for the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Book of the Year 2020. Biz is a 16-year-old girl living with her mum and her siblings, six-year-old twins, Billie and Dart. Biz and her best friend Grace are in Year 11 and have a great “posse” of friends. Their lives are playing out like countless others across the world. The only difference between Biz and everyone else is that she sees and talks to her dead father. He visits and tells her about their life before he died when she was seven.

During a drunken beach party Biz wanders off into the sea. She walks in deeper and deeper thinking that to float away would be preferable to the life she leads now. The voices in her head and that of her father, persuade and suggest and clamour for attention. Biz’s life is not what it seems on the surface. Just when the waves start to drag her further out, she is saved by Jasper, a boy she has seen around her school — a loner who doesn’t mix with others. Biz manages to survive the humiliation of this encounter and moves on with her life. Another Saturday night and more drinking create a catalyst that unravels her life even further. Grace and Biz are blanked and finally, after another disastrous episode, separated.

Biz is left stranded in her own life. It’s a fragile life inhabited by a working mum, busy twins and a more intrusive ghost father. Biz becomes more depressed and isolated and cannot return to school. She is persuaded to take a photography course and there she meets Sylvia, a kind, old widow who befriends her. By pure chance it turns out that Sylvia’s grandson is Jasper and so the two reluctant teens are reunited.

As Biz’s mental health deteriorates, she comes to believe that if she can find her father through visiting his childhood farm and other places he lived, she can save him and herself as well. Jasper and Biz start a journey to discover her father’s roots. It’s a journey that will take unforeseen turns and will push her further into a fog she may not be able to find a way out of.  

Helena Fox has painted an incredibly moving narrative about love and loss. Mental illness and acceptance. Ways to heal and most of all, about forgiveness. The language and imagery used take the reader deep into the mind of the main character and give a glimpse of what it is like to float. To be in a life, to detach to survive — and find your way back.

For Ages: 14 + years

Number of Pages: 372 paperback.

Published: May 2019

Themes: Grief, bullying and mental health.

Rating: 4.5/5