Review: "Light Enough to Float" by Lauren Seal

Light Enough to Float by Lauren Seal
Published October 2024 via Rocky Pond Books
★★★

Evie is fourteen and living in lowercase: afraid to eat, afraid to step outside the rules, afraid to take up space. In Light Enough to Float, she finds herself in treatment for an eating disorder: one extreme / or the other. no room / for moderation. my rules, / but flipped. (loc.1244)

Written in verse, this is a fast read. Much of it will feel familiar if you've read any books in similar settings, though I'm interested to see the way technology and access to phones and so on has changed the ways in which these stories play out and are told; I remember reading books years ago in which characters were sneaking off to log in to Internet forums, and now they're being lectured about the dangers of social media and having their phones taken from them so that they can't access Instagram and the like. I'm also curious about the representation here—Evie notes early on that she didn't know boys could have eating disorders, which surprises me, considering that she's of the social media generation and doesn't so much as blink when another character mentions being trans; makes me think that the book might be largely based on experiences at a point earlier than (e.g.) the 2020s, with some updates for diversity. (I do really like seeing that at least a couple of the characters are married, because eating disorders are so often written off as a teenage thing.)

This will likely go over well—accessible and an easy read. Not groundbreaking but it doesn't need to be. Oh, I'm curious about the title: it's (unsurprisingly) a theme that comes up a few times throughout the book, but what I find so interesting about the title is that floating in water is easiest with some body fat; fat floats, and someone with more body fat will find floating easier than someone with less. In a way, the point of the book is not light enough to float but heavy enough to float. Maybe that was intentional or maybe not, but I appreciated the little play there.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.