Welcome back to Goodreads Monday! It’s been a very hot minute since I did one but I figured I might as well get back into it! This weekly meme was started by @Lauren’s Page Turners and it invites you to pick a book from your TBR and explain why you want to read it. Easy enough, right? Feel free to join in if you want to! I’ll be using a random number generator to pick my books from my insanely long GR Want-to-read list.*

*Sorry if a book has been featured twice. I need to make better note of which ones I’ve done already!

This week’s featured book is How It Feels to Float by Helena Fox. It’s a Young Adult Contemporary that came out in 2019 and has an average rating of 4.02 with over 3k ratings and just under 1k reviews.

A gutting, profound, deeply hopeful portrayal of living with mental illness and grief, this modern-day Bell Jar marks the arrival of an exceptional new talent in the YA space.

Biz knows how to float. She has her people, her posse, her mom and the twins. She has Grace. And she has her dad, who tells her about the little kid she was, who loves her so hard, and who shouldn’t be here but is. So Biz doesn’t tell anyone anything. Not about her dark, runaway thoughts, not about kissing Grace or noticing Jasper, the new boy. And she doesn’t tell anyone about her dad. Because her dad died when she was six. And Biz knows how to float, right there on the surface–normal okay regular fine.

But after what happens on the beach–first in the ocean, and then in the sand–the tethers that hold Biz steady come undone. Dad disappears, and with him, all comfort. It might be easier, better, sweeter to float all the way away? Or maybe stay a little longer, find her father, bring him back to her. Or maybe–maybe maybe maybe–there’s a third way Biz just can’t see yet.

In this mesmerizing, radiant debut, Helena Fox tells a story about love and grief and family and friendship, about inter-generational mental illness, and how living with it is both a bridge to someone loved and lost and also a chasm. She explores the hard, bewildering, and beautiful places loss can take us, and honors those who hold us tightly when the current wants to tug us out to sea.

Why do I want to read it?

I feel like this is an underrated book because I haven’t seen much mention of it on the blogosphere or bookstagram, although that is where I first saw in 2019 on an Australian bookstgrammer’s post! I’ve heard it’s an absolutely gut-wrenching story about grief, loss and depression and although it’ll probably destroy me, I’m always pulled in by these heartbreaking stories. I’m 100% sure that it won’t take much of the read to make me cry those ugly tears but I snagged a copy around the time it came out and it’s been sitting on my physical shelf for a while now just waiting to be read! I definitely think I have to gear myself up to read it though.

Have you read How it Feels to Float or is it on your TBR too?