Undrownable

Ada is 25 years old. She lives in Galicia, Spain, with a hermit and his two dogs. From her seclusion in this remote place, she addresses her younger brother, Broos. She tells him how she experienced their shared childhood and about her current life. After their mother died, they moved in with their callous father in a trailer park.

His motto is ‘Crying is a choice’. He doesn’t want his children to become quitters or crybabies. In his efforts to toughen them up, he deliberately has them be stung by a wasp to find out if they’re allergic and encourages them to push each other underwater to make them ‘undrownable’.

Ada wants to become just like her father and passes this test with flying colors (‘He told me I was a very tough girl. And those words meant the world to me’). Her brother responds differently: a gentle child, he develops a lifelong phobia of wasps. When Ada gets her period at the age of seventeen, her father pulls back: she’s no longer allowed to sleep in the same room and feels bereft. ‘It started with blood. Not like the blood from a wound – bright red, something to show off. No: sticky, viscous, dark, smelly blood.’

After graduating from high school, Ada starts working in a meat factory where she meets Frédérique, a privileged student who helps Ada get into art school. It’s a pathway to a different world in which she finds recognition but doesn’t feel entirely at ease, partly due to the class difference. Her brother, meanwhile, ends up in a juvenile detention center where, at the age of just 23, he is found dead, floating face-down in the swimming pool amid empty beer cans.

Koos’ prose and imagery are vivid and apt. The format of this deftly plotted novel – a sister addressing her brother – gives it suspense and momentum. The dark humor adds complexity, as do the author’s tender descriptions of animals. This is the story of a young woman who survives her childhood in spite of, and because of, her hard-knocks upbringing.