Girl Underwater by Claire Kells

Narrated by Julia Whelan

Girl Underwater is Claire Kells’ debut novel. I was attracted to it by the narrator to be honest, as Julia Whelan is a favourite of mine. The blurb sounded interesting too and I figured I was safe as it was categorised as romance. I admit I spent a good part of the book worrying, but there is a happy ending.

Nineteen-year-old Avery Delacorte is a sophomore at a San Francisco college. She is on their prestigious swim team and she has loved the water since she first learned to swim at age 3. Told in first person from Avery’s point of view, the book begins when she is heading home to Boston for Thanksgiving. Also on the plane are swim team co-captain Phil Markey, and star swimmer Colin Shea. Avery has been avoiding Colin ever since she started college, for reasons which mostly become clear over the course of the book. I say mostly because the listener has to intuit some of the story. Colin is a fairly closed book to Avery and her swim team companions but what is undisputed is his talent. He is better than Michael Phelps and it is expected he will go all the way to the Olympics and win a swag of gold medals there.

Avery and Colin end up sitting together on the plane, much to Avery’s dismay. Around her are 200 other passengers and crew, including three little boys, all from different families. About an hour into the flight, for reasons which are never made clear, their plane crashes into a lake high in the Colorado Rockies. Avery, Colin and the three little boys are the only survivors.

The book then bifurcates into two streams – one tells the story of Avery’s recovery from the mental/emotional trauma of the crash after she is rescued, and the other is the story of what happened for the five days she waited for rescue. As is often the case with “flashback novels” I tended to find myself engrossed in one storyline when it would stop and jump into the other. And, truthfully, for much of the book I really wanted to know what happened during those five days. I think the author does a great job of keeping the listener guessing, particularly for the first half of the book, and generally building the tension with the flashbacks and jumps forward in time.

While the story has a romance, it is not the main focus of the novel. It probably fits better within the YA/NA category as there is a definite coming of age theme and a lot of the book is about Avery coming to grips with these traumatic events and deciding what her life will look like from here on in. She has a boyfriend waiting in San Francisco, a nice guy – a good guy. But she formed a connection with Colin on that mountain. Is she broken now?

I don’t want to say too much more about the plot because the tension of it is in the not knowing.

Julia Whelan does a great job with the narration – as I’ve come to expect. Avery has done her level best to lose her Boston accent, but Colin, who comes from a lower socio-economic area, still has the trademark intonations of his home. Ms. Whelan brings him to life in a way that is not overdone.

Avery’s boyfriend, Lee, is a native Hawaiian and he too has a distinct way of speaking. I think it’s fair to say that most of Ms. Whelan’s male characters contain the same pitch and so it falls to accents to differentiate the characters.

There is also a noticeable (and appreciated) contrast in the voices she gives the little boys.

I mentioned before that there are bits of the story the listener has to intuit. This is partly the case because we only have the POV of Avery and her knowledge is necessarily incomplete. It is also the case because of stylistic choices the author made which leave a certain ambiguity to some parts of the story. I’m generally not a fan of ambiguity, I must admit, but I found the narration helped me out. It felt like Ms. Whelan had done some of the “interpreting” for me. I can’t be sure of course, but my feeling is that the story became clearer for me because of the audiobook format and the skill of the narrator.

I had been expecting a kind of action-adventure rescue/survival type story but Girl Underwater is more subtle than that. Yes, there is survival and rescue (in different ways – for both actually) but it is also a more introspective story and I suspect its success will depend on whether listeners connect with Avery. I did. I found myself very glad to take a (small) risk on a new author.

The romance is very subtle and listeners may need to adjust their expectations going in; this is mostly Avery’s personal journey, with a romantic element thrown in. But I was engaged and interested the whole time and there was enough of a payoff for me to count the listen as a win (even apart from the excellent narration). I could have wished for a bit more clarity in some areas, but I suspect that is more about me and my dislike of ambiguity than anything else.

Kaetrin

Narration: A

Book Content: B

Steam Factor: You can play it out loud

Violence: Some graphic description of injury but not really any violence

Genre: New Adult Contemporary with Romantic Elements

Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio

Girl Underwater was provided to AudioGals by Penguin Random House Audio for review.