Continuous, white, lighter that water, a source of energy. What I am, the part of my body that I most am, is fat. I am not skin or muscle or gristle or bone. Take for example these lines from the story, “When She Is Old and I Am Famous,” when the protagonist compares her own body with her beautiful cousin’s: “Isn’t it funny, how I’ve learned to say it? I am fat.

Her writing is white-hot in its directness, but emotive, tinged by a vague sadness for these nine situations.

But these are extraordinary youth, mixed in with a few young adults still caught up in their pasts. Julie Orringer knows a child’s mind like the back of her own hand. Each story is told in a wise, but youthful voice-narrators with old souls, stuck in a child’s body, commenting, with veracity, on the day-to-day pitfalls of life. In “What We Save” young Helena is forced to spend the day with her mother’s old prom date and his seemingly perfect (and tan) family at Disney World, where she watches her cancer-stricken mother struggle in the heat of Florida, and the heat of memory. In “Note to Sixth-Grade Self”, you’re reminded of the chilling cruelty that young girls are capable of-specifically, their elaborate social castes and lack of empathy for the “outcast”. In “The Isabel Fish”, Maddy grapples with the misplaced grief and blame of her brother, and her paralyzing fear of water after a terrible car crash in a lake. How to Breathe Underwater, by Julie Orringer, is composed of nine stories, all dealing with youth in its varying forms.

How to breathe underwater orringer