"Breathing Underwater"

Like Lisa, I also took the gender quiz and was surprised by some answers but not others. I suppose I answered with total female bias, basing my answers on experiences I had in high school where my girl friends were much more focused on academics than my guy friends were. More specifically, my AP classes were predominantly female and National Honor Society was also made up of a greater number of females. I attributed this to maturity, going off of what I'm sure many of us heard at one point or another: the infamous "girls mature faster than boys."

For the YA reading, I chose a book mentioned in the "Growing Up Female around the Globe with YA" article. "Breathing Underwater," appealed to me as soon as I read the description. A boy at my high school beat his girlfriend to death with a baseball bat my freshman year and I was curious to see how Alex Flinn (author) depicted an abuser. I was even more interested in the novel when I found out it was told from the abuser's perspective, which included a series of journal entries that chronologically lead up to the final violent encounter.

I enjoyed the book in that it provided me with hope that people can change with appropriate help (Nick has definitely grown at the end of the novel but not necessarily reached adulthood), but I was disappointed with the depiction of the victim (Caitlin). She was incredibly weak, much more so than the girl who died at my high school. Caitlin allowed Nick (main character) to make her every decision with the exception of the one that landed her in the hospital. Also, not a single person around her attempted to help her -not even her own mother until the damage was so severe she needed medical attention. I found the rest of the female characters to also be extremely weak and this disappointed me, because I felt like a least one strong woman should be included in a novel that will certainly appeal to and be read by young women. To me, Cailtin seemed doomed from the very beginning by the lack of positive female role models. Although the novel reiterates the obvious: you should not hit, control, or obsess over your girlfriend, I don't think I would recommend this book to young women on basis that it does not remind them of the strong, intelligent, independent, people they are or could surely become.