The Zen Leaf

Breathless is about Katie Kitrell, a strong swimmer from a dysfunctional family. Her older brother, Will, is schizophrenic, and when he becomes violent, Katie’s parents send her to boarding school to keep her safe and out of the way. Once she’s there, she slips into the lie that Will is dead in order to gain acceptance among her rich, snobby peers. She doesn’t want to become a social pariah by admitting he’s just crazy. Unfortunately, the lie is always beneath the surface, threatening to break free and destroy everything she’s built for herself.

The novel is semi-autobiographical.

Not long after I started this book, I figured I wouldn’t like it. It’s very different from my normal tastes. Right away, it was gritty – kids smoking, drinking, vomiting, getting high. The boarding school seemed to be filled with all the same people you always see in boarding schools. I didn’t like any of the characters – not Katie, not the popular and beautiful Estrella or her nice tagalong friend Lindsay, not the obnoxious roommate Mazzie, not the weirdo Christian boyfriend, not the flirting swim coach who makes them all practice until someone pukes every day. And then there was the swimming itself.

You know how when you know a subject, really know it, and then read novels about it or see it portrayed in fictional TV, it’s always wrong? Like when my husband scoffs at the inaccuracies in computer usage on crime shows. It’s hard to suspend disbelief when you know a subject well. Well, I know swimming. I was a competitive swimmer for years. I wasn’t great, but I wasn’t bad either. I don’t like reading about swimming in books or seeing it portrayed on TV because it’s always wrong. I hated A Separate Peace because of the glaring inaccuracies, like the author didn’t bother to do any research. Breathless wasn’t as bad as that by any stretch of the imagination, but it did have a lot of inaccuracies which of course irked me. I can’t help it. It’s what I know.

So with all that, you’d think I would hate the book, right? Swimming inaccuracies, hating all the characters, all the vomit and drugs and alcohol which you guys know I hate…should be the perfect Anti-Amanda book. But…but…I loved it! I don’t know if I can really explain why, but the book is just so good! Good enough to make me forget all the inaccuracies, to make me care about characters I couldn’t stand, to make me read through the gritty parts that normally make me feel so sick to my stomach I can’t continue. In spite of everything, Breathless was excellent.

I know that sounds really weird. I’ll try to explain. I think part of this has to do with the fact that the novel’s semi-autobiographical. Not that that would change my opinion in itself, but everything felt so real because it was based on real events. I could tell Warman felt everything in here, which is sometimes missing from novels. Because it was real to her, it was real to me. I was with those disliked characters every moment. I was drawn into their world in a way I haven’t experienced for awhile now. Then I realized, it wasn’t that I disliked them – I actually really did like who they were deep down; I just didn’t like the things they were doing or the way they were acting. You don’t normally get close enough to characters in a book to feel that way.

I started reading the book in the morning and couldn’t put it down all day long. Each time I had to get up to do something – change the laundry, make lunch for my kids, use the restroom, whatever – I had to give myself a minute of transition time. I’d close the book and feel surprised that I was sitting on my living room couch. I was so engrossed that I didn’t care if my boys got too loud, if I ate lunch on time, if I didn’t get much work done in the house. It was just that good. It’s another one of those books that I’d planned to give away in order to give it more blog face time (released just yesterday!), but can’t because I love it too much. Instead I’m just going to have to encourage all of you to go out and read it!

This is a hard book to describe in a synopsis. The main character is Katie. It’s the summer before her senior year, and she’s struggling with grief after the loss of her mother. She works as a gardening assistant for a reclusive woman who hasn’t been seen in 50 years. In unravelling the mystery of the recluse’s life, Katie tries to come to terms with her mother’s death.

I don’t know that I’ve ever read a book like this before. It was a bit of a mystery, but a slow, quiet mystery. The book has an extremely slow and passive plot, which I appreciated because if it had been rushed, it would have felt very juvenile. As it was, it came off much like the pacing in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, except without the ominous undertone. A lot of the book is thinking and remembering stories, the way Never Let Me Go is. That’s what I mean by quiet. If you’re looking for a plot-based book, this isn’t it.

I’m finding it very difficult to put my feelings about the book into words. I’m a little conflicted about it. I liked the way it was set up, but for some reason didn’t feel the characters as strongly as I would have liked (though I fully admit that could be because I was a little sleep-deprived when I read it). There were some technical issues with verb tenses which I’m sure is just my editorial personality coming through, but mostly, it was very well written. I liked it, but I’m not sure how long it’ll stick with me. Maybe it’ll grow and magnify in my mind the way Never Let Me Go has, but maybe it’ll fade like The Cellist of Sarajevo (another quiet book). I won’t know for quite awhile. At the same time, I think my main issue with the book was I didn’t feel it was unique enough to capture my undivided attention. This is, of course, in complete contrast to the statement above that says I’ve never read a book like it. Maybe what I mean is there wasn’t any spark moment for me to catch onto. It was almost too stripped of life, almost too passive. But I don’t know. It’s one of those books that might possibly have rooted itself very deep in my brain in order to bloom fully as time passes. I won’t know for awhile.

I’m sorry. This is a really awful review. Sometimes I just come across books that are difficult for me to really sort through. This is one of them. I can see some people loving this book, and others getting bored. I think I’ll just have to let time determine how this will affect me longterm.