March 2010 'new gen' Book of the Month title.

A touching and tender teenage novel of love and exploration this tells how sixteen-year-old Emily finds first love and also begins an important search to find her mother. Emily was only two when her artist mother left home and she knows little about her but, as she develops her own talents, she begins to feel the need to find out what her mother is like and why she left. Emily is helped by sensitive Seb, a new boyfriend, who helps her to find a way forward.

Synopsis

Kat and Emily have grown up without their mother for almost as long as they can remember. And now Dad is with Cassy and they all muddle along together well enough - even though they are living in a cramped caravan while their new house is being renovated. Then Cassy and Dad tell them that Cassy is pregnant, and everything seems to shift. Emily feels a new urge to find her own mother. How could she have left them the way she did? Never writing to them? Not communicating with them? And as Emily begins her search, not knowing what she will find, she is at the same time embarking on a new relationship of her own, that of her romance with Seb. This is an evocative and finely drawn novel about family relationships, in particular that of mother and daughter, and the shifting emotions of a teenager trying to make sense of her family and her world.

Reviews

Praise for 'Breathing Underwater': 'Excellent story ... from an author who, notably, has written unpatronisingly and sensitively about teenagers
feelings

The Bookseller
'Never has that sun-soaked, salt-crusted sense of teenage summer well-being been better described.

Guardian
'Julia Green is a writer to watch

David Almond

About the Author

Julia Green is the Course Director on the MA in Creative Writing for Young People at Bath Spa, and has had three novels published by Puffin. She lives in Bath. More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation