<b>Emergence and Coming Out</b>
<i>Review of the upcoming Penguin Random House Canada paperback/audiobook/eBook (January 30, 2024) via the NetGalley Kindle ARC (downloaded December 11, 2023).</i>

I found <i>The Cure for Drowning</i> to be completely engrossing as a coming-of-age story, an endurance during war story, and as a survivors coming home story. It is told in the alternating voices of Katheen (Kit) McNair and Rebekah Kromer. In the years prior to World War 2, Kit is growing up in a farming community near Orangeville, Ontario with her older brother Landon and younger brother Jep. Coming from Montreal, Rebekah moves onto a neighbouring property when her father is hired as the local doctor. In her childhood, Kit survived a drowning incident after which her personality changed, turning her into somewhat of a tomboy (there is a small magic-realism element to her ‘resurrection’). A love triangle develops with Kit and Landon both falling in love with Rebekah. The looming World War and various incidents cause everything to break apart with Rebekah forced to move back to Montreal, for Kit to run away to a vagabond life and for Landon to go to war.

In further dramatic turns, Rebekah and Kit also join the Allied Armed Forces. Rebekah becomes a signals clerk and Kit becomes Christopher (through a rather neat trick which avoids an entry medical physical), a navigator in a bomber crew flying perilous missions over Germany. Landon is meanwhile a sailor in the North Atlantic. A passionate encounter occurs when Landon again meets Rebekah, which brings about her expulsion from military service. Those who survive will meet again after the war back in Orangeville where events take various shocking turns, but where love triumphs in the end in a very satisfying and poetic conclusion. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and look forward its official release and to further books from its author.

This is the first novel by author Loghan Paylor, who has previously published short fiction in magazines and online. They grew up in Ontario and later lived in Montreal, Quebec and currently live in Abbotsford, British Columbia.

My thanks to publisher Penguin Random House Canada and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this preview ARC, in exchange for which I provide this honest review.

(I read an ARC provided by the publisher on NetGalley.)

The promotional material for this book compares it to the work of both Alice Munro and Ann-Marie MacDonald: the former, I assume, because of the small-town Ontario mid-20th-century setting, and the latter for the thoroughgoing queerness of a story set in the past. However, the book lacks Munro's uncanny precision of both prose and character psychology as well as MacDonald's inspired, passionate evocation of both intellectual and emotional experience.

The promotional material also states that this is a "great Canadian novel." I think that's an insult to the work of actually great Canadian novelists like Dionne Brand, Thomas King, Margaret Laurence, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Marie-Claire Blais, Jane Rule, Margaret Atwood, even Robertson Davies and Mordechai Richler.

Then again, the email I got from the publisher nudging me to post my review misspelled their own author's name, so I guess standards are pretty low in general.

I am trying very hard not to write that kind of review where the reader performs how OUTRAGED they are by a BAD BOOK THAT IS BAD. That only serves the reviewer's ego and doesn't do anything constructive (or, frankly, very interesting).

But the fact is that this book is not very good. Its flaws are fundamental, from narrative point of view to sentence-level dullness, from voices that sound nothing like human beings to a screenplay-like flatness of scene and event, unleavened by interiority, reflection, or, really, much sense of consequences/effect.

Put broadly, this is a love story about Kit and Rebekah, who meet in 1939 when they're in their late teens. After drowning at ten years old and being resurrected by weird blood sacrifice, Kit is the middle child of a poor farming family while Rebekah is the pampered only daughter of a German émigré doctor and his French-Canadian socialite wife. Kit's older brother, Landon, overtly courts Rebekah while Kit does so covertly. Neither family evinces discomfort or awkwardness about such different class experiences mixing and socializing; indeed, there isn't much sense of these people existing in a larger world/society until it's plot-necessary. That's when sudden anti-German sentiment drives Rebekah's family back to Montreal, Kit runs away, and the war comes. During the war, Kit joins the RAF and Rebekah does intelligence work until she gets pregnant by Landon, who then disappears for five years. She eventually takes refuge with her daughter at the farm with Kit's parents. Then Kit comes home, too, then Landon, there is a feint at conflict, only everything ends up working out.

This book feels like a summary or LLM-generated model of queer Canadian literary fiction. It has Celtic folklore, queer identities, the historical past, &c., &c. But it doesn't have much at all in the way of substance. Those elements construct a simulacrum that seems like a novel, but the effect is shallow. All surface, no heart or juice. There are so many shortcomings, flaws, and problems here.

These issues might be broken down into those concerning characterization, narrative voice, and prose style; the role played by magic and fantasy; and, finally, gender identity and performance.

In his 2022 essay, "<a href="https://simonmcneil.com/2022/01/15/notes-on-squeecore/">Notes on Squeecore</a>," novelist and critic Simon McNeil describes this quality: there is so "little in the way of internality beyond a gesture ... then it’s reasonable to describe [it] as being composed mostly of surfaces across which action plays. Like a movie, or a TV show." Somehow despite the fact that the book is told in two first-person voices, this lack of interiority and preference for the visibly external predominate. Scenes tend to end with dramatic gestures, quips, or cliffhanger remarks, rather than follow through with depicting the fallout and consequence of such things. Instead, these are summarized later. For example, Kit has a tearjerker scene with a gay man in the RAF who wants to leave; the scene ends with Kit telling him "I have a plan", only to pick up a couple hours later, when Kit explains to the reader what the plan was. It would have been a lot more interesting to see the two of them work out the plan, debate whether it was a good idea, anything, but that's not how this book works. It's more interested in scene breaks than characters having room to breathe.

The characters simply aren't there. We don't come to know them as specific individuals; instead, they are placeholders for what the reader already assumes she knows about "pretty, well-off girl chafing under society's expectations" and "masc enby". The older brother, Landon, is a placeholder for all the bad things about male privilege (just as the sudden appearance of a squadron of Americans makes possible homophobia, previously never an issue). The mothers, too, perform various functions as the plot requires, occasionally supportive, then inexplicably full of rejection when it's time for angst. (And what happens with Rebekah's father? She never seems to miss him, or try to contact him, again.)

There's just no coherence to any element here. There are set-pieces — Kit riding their horse to beat the train, a mean anti-German mob setting upon Rebekah's family, a fight between Kit and Landon, an RAF prank involving a pig — which are interspersed with expository summaries of what the characters have been up to, but there isn't reflection, or change, or anything.

These are rudimentary sketches of people, told in highly digestible, very clear terms. There isn't any room left for nuance, or shadow, or complication. Perhaps ironically, one of the best examples I have for how thuddingly overt the characterization and style are is, textually, about nuance: <blockquote>"I don't expect you to understand what it was like. To you- Germans, Czechs--we are all one people, but the Führer... before he brought destruction to Britain, he destroyed us first."
I nodded. Everything I knew had been filtered through newspaper columns, radio broadcasts, speeches from politicians. It had seemed like such a cut-and-dried conflict. Germany was out to conquer the world and the Allies had to stop it, but of course the truth was more complicated.</blockquote>What is that truth? How is it complicated? Kit never says. It seems to be enough to gesture at the general fact that Things Are Complicated. (Even if that includes defeating <b>Hitler</b>. [There are Unfortunate Implications to this, combined with the emphasis on anti-German bigotry, especially when we consider what was being unleashed on Japanese-Canadians at home and European Jews and Roma at the same time.]) What is the temporal difference that the change in tenses is supposed to indicate? When was it that knowledge "had been filtered" versus the now of "the truth was more complicated": how and when did things change?

I don't think the book is interested in examining that level of psychology. Much as we don't know who Kit and Rebekah, let alone Landon, are before the war, we don't get to see how the war changes them. We are told it does, but the change isn't depicted.

What's more, the two-voice narration is a good idea that doesn't, in the end, accomplish anything, because Rebekah's voice is indistinguishable from Kit's. All the strengths of first-person narration, how it can bring a reader into close intimacy, or hold her at an intriguing remove, how it can communicate emotional states and changing thought patterns, all these are ignored.

The prose is exactly the same, whoever is speaking, composed most often of sentence after sentence structured like this: "Subject verbed an object comma another subject participling adverbily." The rhythm is thuddingly repetitive: <blockquote>The sun had tinted everything gold, the water flowing fast and clear a handspan from my feet. The shale was warm under my palms, the willows throwing blue-green shadows over the water. Rebekah waded back towards me, her skirt bunched in her hands. Her hair fell down her back, tangled from her explorations along the river. She came up the flat stone steps and sat next to me, leaving a trail of damp footprints. She leaned back on her hands, tilting her face up to the sky. I closed my eyes, the sun turning my eyelids a deep red.</blockquote> Once I noticed this sentence construction, I couldn't ignore it; it reaches an absurd apotheosis in a death scene, where we're told, "My father gave a great shudder and a spasm ran through him, tightening all his muscles in sequence." Here, the participial phrase helpfully defines what a spasm is, as if it's a rare term.

In the wartime section, the two narrators actually even use exactly the same words in explaining particular jargon(/demonstrating the author's research): "The ground crew, or erks, as we called them, jogged out to the aircraft" and "there were other 'huff-duff' stations, as we called them, up and down the eastern coast."

I don't know what to say about how magic and fantasy operate in this novel. It's very muddled. As a child, Kit is saved by her mother's sacrifice of a lamb to...some power, possibly the same fae who live in the woods and whisper a lot. Are they the same as the blue-green spirits who live under water? I don't know. And are those the same as the selkies in the family's personal history? Again, I don't know. Magic and the blood sacrifice does something to Kit's gender at age 10, but they're still read as female by Rebekah eight years later. During the war, when Rebekah is giving birth, Kit is parachuting out of a downed bomber, and their consciousness intermingle. I'm not sure why. Like so many thing in this novel, this extraordinary experience is never remarked upon afterward. Later, back in Ontario, Rebekah realizes that her daughter hears the same voices in the woods as Kit does. Nothing seems to come of this, either.

So are magic and fantasy simply decoration to this story? Are they backdoors to explaining plot questions like "how does Kit pass as a man?" Are they there to switch the novel into fairy-tale mode, where things don't have to make sense, they just have to end happily? Maybe. I don't know and I'm not sure the book does, either.

Finally, there is the question of Kit's gender identity; our contemporary term nonbinary is probably the most accurate for who they are. Before and during the war, Rebekah refers to Kit with she/her pronouns, but when the two meet again, somehow (magically?) Rebekah knows to not only fend off gendered terms like "brother/sister" from Kit, but also to use they/them pronouns. Kit themself only mentions passing once, and this is after the war, when they remark on how easily they pass in civilian clothes. Rebekah asks just once, only for Kit to cut her off, about how Kit passed in the military.

I don't think that readers are due prurient details about a character's body. I don't think that queer stories, especially those set in the past, need to be all about fear and hiding. But I do think that, in a book about two pansexual AFAB people, one of whom passes in masculine contexts like the RAF and forestry, we need more about how they feel about gender and social expectations and danger. There are some strong details concerning Landon's unthinking deployment of male privilege and some annoyingly clunky passages about Rebekah's awareness that she performs femininity as a role, so I don't think I'm asking too much about the lack of detail and reflection around Kit's gender presentation. Both the funeral scene for Kit's father and the closing scene depict Kit, Rebekah, and Rebekah's daughter as a seemingly heteronormative family unit; they are living in society as one. What's that feel like? Ignoring such questions does a disservice, both to the reader and to the complicated realities of the past for queer Canadians, like playwright <a href="https://www.canadiantheatre.com/dict.pl?term=John%20Herbert">John Herbert</a>, arrested for indecency in Toronto just after the war, precisely when Kit is there, for, in part, wearing women's clothing.

I'm pretty sure this book will be popular with many readers. You can sell it according to elements like "queer love story HEA" and "enby protagonist" and "Celtic lore". That assembles a nice surface, which readers can fill in with preexisting assumptions.

I'm just not one of those readers, I guess. Not only did this book not work for me, I don't think it works, period.

Described as a boundary-pushing love story and a Canadian historical novel that boldly centers queer and non-binary characters, this book certainly piqued my interest!

Spanning 1931-1953, this is the story of Kathleen/Kit and Landon McNair who are siblings both in love with Rebekah. The story takes us through each of their courtships with Rebekah, their individual stories during their time away during the war and then their eventual return to the McNair farm. Beautiful, heart breaking, completely engaging. The characters were so well written and their stories so interesting I had a hard time putting this down. Very happy that the story ended as it did.

Really loved the book and highly recommend. 4.5*

When is history not history, when is gender not gender, when is sexuality not sexuality? This Canadian novel explores the small differences that occur when your gaze is shifted from the expected to the unexpected. From Canadian farm life to world-changing events, the same themes emerge to complicate lives.

This luminous book weaves this strands together in a way that feels effortless but hasn't been; rather, this is a fine piece of writing of which Canada can be proud.

If you want to explore boundaries or you want to challenge the seen vs the unseen, then this is also the book for you. Highly enjoyable.

This book was beautifully written. The characters were well developed. The writing was so descriptive and lent itself to vivid imagery in the imagination. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada for the opportunity to read and review this ARC.

This award-winning debut is not the only Canadian novel to feature gay and trans characters, but it is the first to make two young women and their various relationships and identities its focus. It also speaks to something most Canadians will know something about, since it is so historically ingrained: the cultural differences between French and English Canada.

The two women are Montreal-born and educated Rebekah Kromer, when anti-German xenophobia sends her German physician-father seeking sanctuary for his francophone wife and child in Ontario, and Kathleen/Kit McNair, born of a struggling farm family in a fictional rural village. The doctor’s early welcome is short-lived. Anti-German feeling mounts among the locals as war appears imminent in the summer of 1939. Within a few months of the family’s attempted resettlement in the manor house they were given to entice them to the doctor-less town, a band of drunken youth attack them as they leave the Labour Day dance where Rebekah danced happily with Kit’s brother Landon and sneaked away to make love with Kit in a storeroom. The next morning, Rebekah and her high-strung and self-absorbed mother are on the dawn train back to Montreal, with Dr Kromer close behind.

It should be said here that Rebekah, with her parents’ encouragement, had formed close bonds with the McNairs, including the youngest boy, Jep, in the few months of her rural stay. She was attracted to the “boyish” Kit, who fell for her immediately, but also to the aggressively manly Landon, who pursues her from the start as well. She loves Kit, however, and a misunderstanding caused by her sudden departure ruins the promise she and Kit had made to run away together. Landon signs up with the Royal Navy; Kit, in male attire and with shorn hair, manages to enlist with the RAF and join Bomber Command; Rebekah, now Becca Beauxdoin (her French family name), eventually joins the WRENS for a code-breaking job in Halifax.

Underneath all this is the Celtic legend about the selkies, the part seal-part female water spirits who tie together the destinies of Kit and Becca and effectively provide “the cure for drowning.”

This is a beautifully written tale that weaves legend and history, magic and reality, the clash between social expectation and the need to live as your true self. If there’s one thing could have been shortened, it would be the details about Becca’s intelligence work and Kit’s RAF missions. So many Second World War novels have all the women joining the WRENs and doing secret code-breaking, and all men in the RAF bombing Germany. At least in this case the RAF has, unbeknownst to them, a trans person flying deadly missions.

Or maybe I’ve just read too many Second World War novels. This one does stand out in so many ways, however, that it was nonetheless an excellent read.

Five stars. The only thing I am disappointed about is that this is the author's first novel. I want more!

The McNairs are an Irish immigrant family who have settled on a farm in Southern Ontario. While still very young, Kit falls through the ice while exploring the woods with her two brothers. She drowns but is nursed back to health by her mother.

After the accident, Kit bristles against the expectations of her as a farm girl. She often steals her brother's clothes to wear while doing boy's chores -- and then the cooking and cleaning when her mother makes her.

In 1939, Rebekah Kromer moves to town with her parents from Quebec. Her father is facing increasing difficulty finding work as a German immigrant in the lead up to World War II.

Soon both Kit and her brother Landon are jostling for Rebekah's attention and affection. This love triangle rips their families apart and sends them all on their own paths to war.

While using borrowed identification papers, Kit joins the Air Force as a young man. Landon joins the Navy. Rebekah joins naval intelligence efforts at home in Canada.

Kit goes by different names/pronouns throughout the book, but I will use the name Kit and they/them pronouns for the rest of the review.

Trans magic

One could argue that all the events in this story could happen in real life, but there is a hint of magic to many of the scenes involving Kit. It starts with their drowning and unlikely recovery as a young child. This motif returns several times throughout the novel. There is also frequent repetition of a story for children about selkies, or Ireland's version of mermaids.

It is implied that Kit's gender non-conforming and rebellious nature is due to them being a magical creature, perhaps a selkie or changeling. In Irish folklore, changelings are faeries who are left in the place of stolen human children.

Of course we modern readers know that trans and non-binary genders naturally exists from birth, as do queer people. When queer and trans people are forced into straight and cisgender roles against our nature, it can make us rebel as we suffer under the weight of these expectations.

I love that this book allows us to imagine Kit as something supernatural, rather than defective or deviant. By extension, it allows us queer and trans readers to imagine ourselves in this way. It is difficult for a magic creature to live among us mere mortals!

Dealing with difference

This books portrays homophobia, anti-German discrimination and sexism in a way that is likely true to its time. Rebekah being a queer, German woman faces some of the worst of it. Kit living as a man for a large part of the book gets off a bit easier in some but not all ways.

As I write in my Queer Joy Test for Fiction, I find this realistic portrayal of homophobia and transphobia acceptable when our main characters find love and safety to balance it out. I want to feel uplifted when I put down a book with queer characters, not depressed scared. I found this book very satisfying in this regard.

One thing I particularly appreciated was how the story of Kit's time in the Air Force was told. They have joined using borrowed papers and name, and everyone considers them to be a cis man. The story unfolds about their time as a soldier, not their body. I appreciate not giving into that voyeurism around trans bodies that some cis people crave. People assigned female at birth have been fighting as men in wars for as long as we have recorded history. This is just accepted as fact and we move on.

Recommendation

This is not a book I would have usually picked up, but I am so glad I did. I loved the mix of family drama and action scenes from World War II. I love how the queer and trans characters are portrayed in the novel, and feel comforted by the lives they make for themselves despite hardship. These characters and story will stick with me for a long time.

This book was such a delight. It was part historical fiction with a touch of magical realism and a beautifully written queer love story at it's core. Both of the character POV's felt distinct and I found myself rooting for and thinking about these characters even when I wasn't reading. The way Paylor wrote about Kit as a non-binary character was very touching and the subtle change to they/them pronouns was a seamless way to indicate that Kit was finally able to live as their true self. I have read many historical fiction novels set in WWII and I found it refreshing to read one centered on Canada and our contribution to the war effort.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this advance copy in exchange for my honest review

Thank you to Netgalley and Penguin Random House Canada for access to this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I need to start by saying this book wasn't my usual genre of preference. I am an avid psych thriller reader, but I was looking for a change of pace. I got what I came for in the besy way.

I loved the characters in this book and how they developed throughout the storyline. I thought I had an idea of where things were headed, when in fact, I didn't have a clue.

I did find the story dragging in parts, especially through Part 1, but it did pick up as the story unfolded in Part 2 and 3.

I couldn't have asked for a better ending. A lovely story and much appreciated break from my usual.

The characters are well written with painterly descriptions of the landscapes and lush, vivid imagery throughout the book. Will read again.

The Cure for Drowning is historical fiction with a touch of magic realism, set in southern Ontario in the 1930s.

Quick synopsis: At 10 years old, then Kathleen falls through the ice near their home in southern Ontario, drowns and is brought back to life by their mother's Celtic magic. Once nursed back to health, Kit, as they are now known, is never quite the same -- rambunctious, gender-bending and boundary-pushing. Flash forward several years and propelled by anti-German sentiment in their hometown of Montreal in 1939, Rebekah and her family move to the town where she befriends Kit and their older brother Landon. Brought together, the three soon find themselves ripped apart by both their complicated relationships and WWII. Kit joins the Royal Air Force where they are known as Christopher while Landon joins the Navy and Rebekah moves to Halifax. When their lives are drawn together once again after the war, their past relationships must be reconciled before they can move forward.

I adored this book, from page one to the end. This is an unapologetically queer story and the reading world needs more of these stories. I especially liked that it was a historical novel. Rather than giving the sense that non-binary issues are a contemporary phenomena, setting it in the past rightfully tells us that non-binary and queer people have always existed and their stories deserve to be told.

The book alternates between the POVs of Kit and Rebekah. At one point, their POVs collide explosively and Paylor's writing brilliantly mirrors what is happening in the narrative.

The touch of magic realism does not seem at all out of place in this otherwise historically placed novel. Paylor uses it judiciously and i did not question its appearance.

Beautifully written with well developed characters.

[arc review]
Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada for providing an arc in exchange for an honest review.
The Cure for Drowning releases January 30, 2024

A solid 3.5

Paylor’s debut is part family saga, part WWII historical fiction, and part mythological tale about selkies.

The intentionally slow nature and it being a character driven story drew me in, and I was loving everything in part 1, from the Canadian setting to the complex family dynamics and taut love triangle (hello, that kissing in the rain scene!!!).
There was a lot of intrigue set up with the introduction of a drowning, near death experience, and the possibility of integrating changelings or being brought back by magic, but I felt that this aspect of the story never went anywhere. Sure, there was a lot of straddling the line with hinting at mythological creatures, gut feelings, and their family bloodline, but Paylor never fully took the big leap I was hoping to find.

When we get to part 2 of the story, I lost a bit of interest, not because the quality of writing wasn’t good, but because the stark transition of genres from a lit fic family saga to WWII was jarring, and felt like two separate novels featuring the same set of characters.
Similarly, at one point, the writing was very confusing and chaotic because two pov’s/plotlines were alternating every paragraph without indication, and I think they were even blended together at some points which was an interesting choice to say the least.
On one hand, we had someone in active labour, while juxtaposed with an active flight mission.
Being a more critical reader, I could see the likeness between the two in the moment and what the author was probably trying to achieve, but from an execution standpoint, it was messy.

One of our main characters is queer and non-binary, which I loved especially given the late 1930’s/early 1940’s time period, but at the same time, I felt like their identity was too vague.
There was a clear change in the character after their near death experience, but it’s never really explained in depth from their perspective. Then you have them taking on the identity of another boy in order to gain a position in the Air Force, and the reader is just supposed to assume that there’s no issues blending into an all male team? It’s shown that they are intimate with another team member, but are we to assume that it’s only a one way exchange and that’s how “Christopher” isn’t outed? Did Kit never get periods? There’s so much that just <I>was</I>, and I wish there had been more of an open discussion, not that the reader is owed this clarity, but more so for the sake of giving Kit a voice and to hear more of their inner thoughts and turmoil to better understand them.

Critiques aside, this was a strong debut and I look forward to reading more of this author’s work in the future.
With some tightening up in the structure and deeper exploration of core themes, this has the potential to be a 4 star or higher read.

cw: animal death, homophobia, f-slur, discrimination

When I read the synopsis I thought it sounded wonderful, and was excited to read the Netgalley arc! Sadly, it wasn't as enjoyable as I'd hoped. Although it did have promise at the beginning, it's implied that maybe Kit could be a changeling or perhaps magic brought them back from death.. except the magic had no real information. It had no explanation or how the mother knew any, because after Kit is back their family does nothing ever again magical. But now Kit is labled as "different" and "hard to manage", since the character is trans it comes off badly like they've been made into this from the magic.
The magic is only really mentioned randomly a couple of times, again without any real details. Same as when characters would speak French, words or sentences were tossed in with not enough around them to explain what is being said. I don't speak French and eventually gave up even reading those parts since half the time I didn't know what was said exactly.
The first half of the book kept me going wanting to see how these characters and their entwined relationships were going to grow but it fell flat. I do think the author should keep writing because I feel there is great potential for future books. Sadly this one just wasn't it for me.

I loved the characters in this book especially, I thought they were well developed and interesting, if not always relatable. Amazing non-binary protagonist who felt real and relatable (although I wished their identity didn't feel like it came from the supernatural source). The language was beautiful and I really enjoyed reading a character focused family epic with just a little bit of supernatural. I will say I felt the pacing flagged towards the end of the book and that some of the more unlikeable characters lost some nuance, but I really loved the experience of reading it and am looking forward to whatever this author puts out next.

This Canadian historical, magical book written about the struggles of new Canadians. The magical realism pulls in the reader and entices them to learn more about the McNair family.

A Cure for Drowning follows Kit and Rebekah. They meet in small town Ontario when Rebekah's family moves there from Montreal, trying to avoid rising tensions due to her father being German. The story is told from the perspective of both Kit and Rebekah, which kept the story flowing. I enjoyed both narrators. It felt like a unique take on a WWII story, but focuses more on Rebekah and Kit and their relationships with each other and their families.

This was a thoroughly enjoyable book that drew me right in and held my imagination until the last page. A fan of Canadian historical fiction, I've never read anything quite like it. I love the window it provides into the life of a non-binary person in the 1930s-1950s, including their complicated love story with a girl who also has connections to their brother.

I'll be recommending this beautiful and profoundly satisfying story widely, and I hope it will receive the attention it deserves.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read the digital ARC in advance of publication in exchange for an honest review.

An event occurs in Kit's childhood that leads their family to believe them a changeling and thus differentiates Kit from the rest of the McNairs; Rebekah leaves her childhood in Montreal for the rural landscape of Harrichford. With the story told in two distinct perspectives, and then a third, A Cure for Drowning tells a story of truth, one that hinges on possibility.

The span of time in which the story takes place, from 1931 to 1953, stretches the march of narration. It does not necessarily slow it down; the expansion recreates historical Canada in which the characters move. Even as the shadow of the second world war looming in the forefront of the narrative, the tension resides in the love triangle between Landon, Kit, and Rebekah. Masterfully done, with tasteful contrast between how the two McNairs approach their courtship with Rebekah.

The characters are so well written—Rebekah's socialite persona, Kit's vigour, and Landon's cocky, self-assured manner—that the conflict feels real. There is no issue of attachment because of this.

While the expansive descriptions of the rural landscape at first impresses and offers comfort and the ability to view the town of Harrichford in the way Kit sees it in all its lushness, it becomes repetitive after a certain point.

In all, it's part Whiskey When We're Dry but with the emotional resolution that one craves, and part Backwards to Oregon for the gender-based turnabouts that never fail to excite me.

The writing as vivid and the characters jump off the page at you.

The journeys they take and the paths life leads them on are well written and impossible to stop reading.

The story went in directions I wasn’t expecting but it was still so well paced that it was hard to stop reading and at the end I wanted more.

I received an eARC from the publisher and NetGallery but the opinion is my own.