The Weight of Water
Summary:
Thirteen-year-old Kasienka has just arrived in wet, damp Coventry, England from Gdansk in Poland with her mother. Kasienka’s father had left for England, seemingly without explanation, and Kasienka’s mother is determined to find him. Kasienka misses her home, and feels like an outsider at her new school, where she is bullied by Clair, who is threatened by Kasienka’s aptitude for sport, especially swimming. Kasienka often feels deeply and almost physically out of place, with all the complications and upheavals in her life, but she finds solace in the language that swimming allows her to speak, through the relationship she develops with William, whom she meets at the swimming pool, and when she finally makes a new and trustworthy friend, Dalilah.
Edited by: Dublin City University
Comment:
Written in verse, this novel explores the often fraught relationship between Kasienka and her mother, who is obsessed with the search for her missing husband which she pursues to the detriment of everything else. The complicated mother-daughter relationship is echoed in Kasienka’s relationship with her father’s new partner, Melanie, who is happy and content in her domestic situation, unlike her own mother. Kasienka battles with a visceral sense of being out of place: she does not fit in at school; she is athletic and confident in the power of her own body as a swimmer, yet deeply uncomfortable in her body which she describes as “Self-assembly furniture/Gone wrong”. Kasienka deals with the weight of other girls’ meanness, and the opposite, some girls’ pity toward her, until she befriends Dalilah, a Muslim girl who is new at the school and who has secrets “just as strange as mine”, providing a powerful female friendship. The books ends with a meditation on the power of the two girls looking out together at the often difficult world in solidarity and friendship.