Barely Floating

In this past month, I’ve read 3 books that specifically referenced STARFISH by Lisa Fipps as a comp title, and I am here to tell you, not all that glitters is gold, and while I thought this was a fine middle grade novel, especially since it featured a sport/hobby you don’t see talked about a lot for this age…but just because your protagonist is a fat middle schooler doesn’t mean your book will pack the emotional punch and hug of STARFISH.

In Barely Floating, Nat decides to pursue joining a diverse synchronized swim team against the wishes of her uber-liberal parents who don’t like her putting emphasis on her looks, etc. The thing is, Nat’s a fat kid, and she LIKES looking pretty in the wat-especially since not everyone sees her as pretty on land. Plus, as she spends time with the team, she finds she likes it. The problem is, she’s hiding things, lying to her parents, draining her savings account, and losing her friendship with her best friend in search of a team that might not even be her future.

While I like the core of the story, I found the inclusion of Nat’s more er….negative attributes kept appearing at the worst times, and made it hard for me to like her and root for her as much as I wanted to. There were several implications of her “fighting,” she blows up a lot more than the story necessitates, and while I did appreciate the way the expectations were subverted at times, and she was ALLOWED to be that way without being a stereotype, I didn’t feel like her character arc was fulfilled.

There were some moments I could tell were supposed to be emotional, and they just didn’t land. There’s a great moment at the end where her mom is saying “I want you to be beautiful without alll of that makeup” and Nat, who is fat while her mom is not, hits her with the “you may tell me I’m beautiful, but I don’t always feel that way in society” and I know if Lisa Fipps had written that, I would be crying on the floor.

Overall, this book is okay. It doesn’t land as hard as I wanted it to, doesn’t break any new ground for me as a reader, and overall…I’ll recommend it to swimming kids, but will probably forget about it in a few months.