Georgia Under Water: Stories

Author Heather Sellers takes you on an awesome ride with her protaganist Georgia Jackson in this wonderful book. From teenage sexuality, an alcoholic father, the complexity of sibling relationships to just finding a way to survive in a dysfunctional family, Sellers paints a vivid picture of the emotion, angst and delight tied up in all this. In our everyday lives, we tend to surround ourselves with all that is comfortable, known and a bit fluffy. Reading about the hard turns in life, the ugly, the downright uncomfortable is something most of us avoid. But by reading this gem of a book I found such value in exploring the deeper, darker realms of the human condition. Sellers takes you there. I felt a tenderness, almost maternal feeling for Georgia but I also recognized that she is on the same journey we are all on. Trying to figure it out and survive. Granted her circumstances are difficult and most of adults who surround do not offer the mentoring or emotional foundation that she needs. But you feel that she is going to be ok and that you would recognize her on the street (and want to invite her out for coffee.) I have urged friends to read this book, to understand that life isn't all that warm and fuzzy for everyone, to find value in that lesson and discover the bright words of an up and coming writer.

I love the lively, wry, sometimes even laugh-out-loud details Sellers offers us about her characters' uneasy lives, but love even more the fact that she keeps it all so fiercely honest. Georgia is precocious, Georgia is a hoot, but Georgia is also a young girl facing a world of trouble. This is an amazing book. Sellers creates a large, vivid, rambling world for Georgia, but at the same time gives us a wonderfully intimate tour of Georgia's adolescent heart.

Georgia Jackson, a teenager living in Florida in the late 1970s, has a lot on her mind. Her parents are splitting up, she alternately loves and hates her alcoholic father, her brother runs away every month, and, most significant, she's growing up to be beautiful. This book has a cool format--it's made up of a series of interlocking chapters that can be read seperatly or as a whole novel. I loved it because Georgia makes the most simple, yet perfect observations. She compares a boyfriend's hands to "cheerful squids" and her newly lengthy legs to "long, sleek noodles." Also, unlike the heroines of most books about teenage girls, she's wild and confident.

Georgia Under Water is a beautifully crafted book that makes us remember the difficulties of adolescence and the beauty of looking back. Sellers takes us into a world that makes us feel Georgia's life as if it were (is) our own. With her graphic descriptions of something as ordinary as a scab and the profound feelings of an adolescent surrounded by dysfunctional parents, Sellers illicits emotions we forgot we had. With her incredible storytelling ability, Sellers recounts in first person the story of Georgia, a young girl who we grow to love. In her difficult situation, Georgia manages to persevere and to survive amidst the craziness. We feel the rejection from those around her, but bounce back with her as her resilience reminds us that she will make it. Surrounded by adults whose maturity is less than that of Georgia, she grows up and matures amidst the chaos. Sellers' writing is deliberate, careful and so believable that you must constantly remind yourself that you aren't really inside the head of an adolescent. This is a book that should be read and reread and then passed on to someone whose struggles are similar to Georgia's so they know they are never alone in the world.

It is 1:54 pm, and it has been almost 11 hours since I finished reading Heather Sellers' new collection of short stories, Georgia Under Water. They are phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal. I didn't understand what she was doing for about the first half of her first short story, and then my brain finally woke up and I was able to _see_ what was being written. I have read so many hundreds of books about adolescent girls, and I love some of them a lot. Sitting in my suburban backyard on a blanket, I honest to God thought that I and L.M. Montgomery's Emily of New Moon were soul-linked, that I had oh-so-much-in-common with the protagonist of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and that every single Madeleine L'Engle character was another extension of myself. However, I had never met Georgia. I had never known that she existed. Georgia is real. Not only is her mind sharp and soft and wanting, but her whole being is the impossible paradox of selfishness and altruism that I'm afraid I'm still exhibiting. Her thoughts are so specific and outrageous that I wish I could ignore them and separate them from myself as a reader, but I cannot. Why? Because I've thought them all before myself. They may not be the in the exact same forms, but some of them are so parallel to what was in my own head that it's eery. This book contains the missing bits and pieces of an adolescent girl's mind that I would swear to God never existed, but which, as I am forced to admit time and time again as I grow in love and understanding with Georgia, did. This "character" (though I hesitate to give her such a cold term) is honest and perceptive and blind and self-centered and full of impossible imaginations and biases and completely and utterly true. But this book. This is not a command, but I seriously think you won't be able to just check it out from the library. You won't be able to part with it. You'll want to see how it reads when you're in water (oh the water imagery is just beautiful). You'll have to underline different phrases and descriptions on it with something permanent, and you'll have to keep it on your bookshelf. Why? You'll want to just reassure yourself that a text like this exists.