Drowning is Inevitable is a heart-wrenching take on Southern Gothic fiction in the style of a young adult contemporary novel. The main character, Olivia, lives in a small town in Louisiana called St. Francisville, where her parents grew up. She lives in a sort of suspended reality where she does the same thing every day, refusing to make any important decisions or plot a course for her own life. This lack of initiative bothers her boyfriend, Max, especially because she won't plan to go to any specific college. In this town, everything is the same as it has always been, and children grow up to do the same things as their parents. Olivia's mother, Lillian, committed suicide on her eighteenth birthday, so Olivia can't see far beyond that quickly approaching day - in her mind, her eighteenth birthday seems to be the upper limit of her life. Beyond that, life seems like a vague blur.
Olivia's struggle to break free from her mother's legacy is a major aspect of this novel. Her life in St. Francisville is characterized by her mother's suicide: she has few friends because the town's parents don't want them associating with her, like suicide can be genetic and contagious. She looks like Lillian and generally acts like her as well, causing people to think that she might follow in her mother's footsteps. She even resembles her mother in her state of existence, which almost borders on mental illness. On several occasions, Olivia comments that she's crazy, which might not be too far from the truth - by the end, she's regularly seeing a psychiatrist for her issues. At the novel's conclusion, Olivia understands how she should view her mother: not as a crazy woman who should be avoided, but as a mother who loved her and endowed her with the special qualities that make her unique.
This is a novel primarily about two things: loyalty and grief. Olivia and her friends share an incredibly strong loyalty: when Jamie does something terrible in a fit of anger, all four hit the road and leave their lives behind in order to try to protect him. On the trip, they deal with terrible betrayals and threats from others, but they remain loyal to each other and support each other through hardship. The disloyalty of Vicky and Steven are presented as the opposite of these bonds, and their treachery spells disaster for Jamie, a loss that severely impacts his friends.
Jamie's death ties loyalty to grief, the other major theme about which the novel makes a specific point. Olivia has lost her mother, and she doesn't know how to grieve her death. She mostly does so by putting her out of her mind, being inexperienced in grieving and receiving no help from either her father, who won't adopt her, or her grandmother, who experiences delusions. Jamie's death, however, is a more immediate, visceral one for Olivia, who at first believes that life cannot continue without him. His death truly seems like the end of her world. In the novel's final chapter, however, Olivia demonstrates how she's learning to move on (with the help of her therapist). Instead of moving on and forgetting Jamie's death, along with that of Lillian, she learns to grieve properly, dwelling upon the good that came from their relationships and still loving them, even in death, without allowing the grief to overwhelm her with sadness and regret.
This is a profoundly emotional novel, and one that uses dramatic examples to hammer in the point. It's a transposition of Flannery O'Connor into the modern era, and it's a wonderful introduction to young adults to the challenges of grief and the role of loyalty in one's life.
