![]() ![]() " She'd like to take her by the shoulder," the caregiver reflects darkly on her charge, "shake her, wake her up: This is the world, not what your parents have told you. ![]() The author makes her sobering point deftly in a couple of lines deep into a story called Care, in which a 20-something druggie, in charge of her 6-year-old niece for a day, loses her in the festive yet alien atmosphere of the San Francisco piers. But as each story ends, none is out of the woods yet. ![]() All the protagonists have experienced shattered lives all have been confronted by pain and loss in one form or another.Īll are determined to find some way out of the emotional, physical and psychological morass. This is all the more impressive since the characters themselves run up against ugly times, ugly people and ugly circumstances. The individuals the reader encounters - some in first-person renderings, others in third-person - are beautifully and sensitively drawn. More than a mere phrase, however, it mirrors the unifying theme of the book's nine episodes: the capacity of women - kids to adults - to overcome whatever challenges life hurls their way. Unlike the typical pattern with such collections, How to Breathe Underwater is not the title of one of the stories but rather a descriptive phrase that surfaces in a vignette about a teenage girl who survives a car accident in which her girlfriend perishes. ![]()
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