Thank you, Jennifer Niven, for writing the book that I needed as a teenager, and showing that, even though the results may not be exactly what you want, you have to be open to the possibilities life offers.
Breathless starts slowly, and while I was enjoying it I didn’t think it was going to cause the emotional gut-punch it did. It’s a book about love, learning to accept yourself and to have the confidence to take risks as they hurt but can bring wonderful things.
The main character in this, Claude, is a curious character, who definitely grew on me. She starts the book in a fairly safe place with certain expectations, then learns that things don’t always go to plan…but it can be okay. She is definitely feeling uncertain as she’s about to head to college, her best friend has started a relationship she didn’t know about and things are changing/she’s losing control of the things happening around her. Her summer begins in an unsettling way, with her parents announcing they are going to split up and she is expected to spend the summer on an island with her mother.
Cut off from everything she knows, this actually opens Claude to the possibility of new experiences. She takes solace in the immediacy of the wonderful natural environment around her, she learns to ride a bike and she starts a relationship with someone who changes her in ways she couldn’t imagine.
It would be so easy to reduce this to a summer romance category and make what we watch between Claude and Miah seem trite. That would, I think, be missing the point. It might not be exactly what we’d wish for either, but in its own way it’s beautiful.
I will be urging everyone to read this upon its September 2020 release, and would like to thank the publishers, Penguin, and NetGalley for letting me read it early.