Review: "Don't Forget to Breathe" by Brianna R. Shrum and Sara Waxelbaum

Don't Forget to Breathe by Brianna R. Shrum and Sara Waxelbaum
Published October 2025 via HarperCollins
★★★

For Hanna, uprooting is normal. As an army brat, she's used to picking up and moving. Zoe, though, is grounded—except when she dances. Then she flies. And when their lives intersect, sparks fly too.

I don't read as much YA as I used to, but I like ballet books, so here we are. This was a fun read with a number of overlapping themes—as well as Zoe making tentative plans for her future (and Hanna, well, putting off making even tentative plans for her future), we have neurodiversity, Hanna's worries about her mother, figuring out (some of) the intricacies of sexuality, Hanna struggling with the idea of developing relationships that might last, and so on.

I appreciated Hanna's struggle with sorting out her emotions around parental deployment; she's of an age to be butting heads with her parents but also old enough to understand the real risks that come with deployment, and her struggle to balance all those emotions feels realistic. (I also kind of love how ill prepared for post–high school life she is; she has big dreams but not really the drive to pull them off.) I think I would have liked to see Hanna's storyline with her parents explored a bit more, though; she's perhaps a little less stormy by the end of the book but hasn't worked all that much out yet. Or rather—she starts to figure out how some of that uncertainty has affected her, but not really to make any progress with her family.

This feels like one for readers who like their characters' emotions big—Hanna and Zoe fall hard and fast, and their conversations lean intense and sometimes dramatic in that way of teenagers who are, well, hormonal and full of emotions and still figuring out what to do with them all. I probably could have used a bit more levity at times, but I think this will be a good fit for teenagers who are also in that figuring-it-out stage.

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