Out of Breath

The novel opens with a powerful scene. On New Year's Eve Emma again plans to stay in her room; Meg borrows her black boots, and Peyton pulls from the box under the bed a white T-shirt covered in blue handprints and a blue jewellery box. Emma snatches the box and shuts it, but «it was already too late»: all the pain she has not felt for a year and a half comes flooding back. She goes for a run, screams in a park until she nearly faints, then tells Peyton: «I'm coming with you.» Donovan writes the physical, bodily side of grief very well here.

The following chapters read like a list of the ways Emma tries to return to «numbness»: drinking for the first time, waking in the house of Gev, whose name she can hardly recall in the morning, pushing Meg fully clothed into a pool at a party, stage-diving backwards into a concert crowd with Serena's encouragement, and, after Sara's heartbreak, going to a tattoo parlour to have her own drawing inked on her left hip. Beneath all of it lies the same wish: either to feel nothing or to drown the pain with another sensation — adrenaline, physical hurt. The psychology rings true and may feel familiar to young readers.

The most affecting episode is Sara's midnight call. Jared, whom she has loved since high school and called the one she was «made for», has announced his engagement in the New York Times. Emma finds the photo online, drops the phone, runs to the toilet and throws up, then listens to Sara sobbing for hours: «I'm not going anywhere as long as you need me.» For the first time Emma forgets her own pain to support someone else's. But the sentence that follows reveals the book's real knot: «Every choice has a consequence. I deserved everything that made my heart ache.»

Cole is the novel's «rescuer», and here the book's weakness shows. Blond, calm, a surfer studying business, he waits quietly for Emma in the library, asks for «fifteen minutes», refuses to kiss her when she is drunk, brings her home and covers her with a blanket, takes her to the zoo to feed a giraffe. The flawless boyfriend who always does the right thing is a genre staple. Their week in Santa Barbara — a thousand-piece jigsaw on rainy days, surfing lessons, quiet evenings — is nicely written, but the plot often moves along predictable lines.

The darkest scene is a moment nobody notices. After a rough night Emma wades into the ocean, floats on her back away from the shore, hears in the water filling her ears that «nothing mattered» and wonders what it would be like to let the sea swallow her. Later, on a canoe trip, hearing the voice of an old memory («Jump, Emma»), she leaps from a high cliff without telling anyone and hits the rocks on the bottom. Donovan writes these scenes coldly and precisely, without romanticising them; that is the book's most valuable quality.

Technically the Turkish translation reads smoothly, but the editing is weak: even the original title is misspelled «Out Of Breathe» in the imprint. As the third book in a series, much about Evan, Jonathan and Emma's mother is only hinted at, which makes the first hundred pages confusing for newcomers. Still, the passages showing how grief is hidden and how it explodes rise above the genre's average.

• A precise portrayal of grief as something lived in the body
• Self-harm shown without romanticisation
• Warm, sincere portraits of female friendship