How It Feels To Float, by Helena Fox, is a novel wrapped around the obsession of death. How we as people view death, the one inevitable thing we won’t be able to escape.
This novel revolves around a 16-year-old girl from Australia named Biz. She struggles with every emotion that comes her way, not knowing how to feel in the moment, only to feel it later. She talks a lot about her father’s death that happened when she was very young, around 7 years old.
She talks very openly about her mother and little siblings, and the adaptations they had to make through it all, focusing on her mother. Something I found interesting was how she mentioned her mother’s first date after he died. Biz comments how the sacred last kiss of her dad would be forever gone if her mother kissed someone else. Gnawing at the tragic fact that everything can erode, even if you can’t see it.
To cope with her father’s passing in her way, she imagines him in the present. She can imagine him in any situation she’s in, knowing what he would say in the moment, and seeing when he would leave. She talks to him through memory, trying to understand everything around her.
This novel includes identity crises, teenage torment, and seeing how a death through a young person’s eyes can shape someone for the rest of their life and how they view themselves and everyone else. Death is something so certain and sacred, yet it’s the one thing humans won’t ever fully understand.