Breathless

by Jennifer Niven

Overview

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of All the Bright Places comes a compulsively readable novel about a teen girl determined to write her own story—sex, heartbreak, family dramas, and all.

"A coming-of-age story that will make your heart ache." —PopSugar

With high school coming to an end, Claudine Henry is focused on four things: sex, starting college, becoming a famous writer, and... sex. But when her parents announce they're splitting up, her entire world begins to fall apart. The epic road trip she planned with her best friend is cancelled, and she finds herself stuck on a remote island off the coast of Georgia with her mom - an island with no WiFi, no cell service and no friends.

Until she meets the free spirited, mysterious, and beautiful Jeremiah. He infuriates and intrigues her. Their chemistry takes her by surprise, and when Claude decides he should be her first, she tells herself it's just sex. Exactly what she wanted, right? They both know that what they have can't last forever, but maybe the time they have can be enough.

"Romantic and sexy." —Judy Blume, acclaimed author of Forever

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781524701963
Publisher:	Random House Children's Books
Publication date:	09/29/2020
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.40(d)
Lexile:	HL760L (what's this?)
Age Range:	14 - 17 Years

About the Author

Jennifer Niven is the #1 New York Times and internationally bestselling author of All the Bright Places and Holding Up the Universe. Her books have been translated in over 75 languages, and have won literary awards around the world. When she isn't working on multiple book and TV projects—including the script for the film All The Bright Places (Netflix)— Jennifer also oversees Germ, a literary web magazine for high school age and beyond. Jennifer divides her time between coastal Georgia and Los Angeles. Find her at jenniferniven.com and on social.

Read an Excerpt

8 days till graduation 
I open my eyes and I am tangled in the sheets, books upside down on the floor. I know without looking at the time that I’m late. I leap out of bed, one foot still wrapped in the sheet, and land flat on my face. I lie there a minute. Close my eyes. Wonder if I can pretend I’ve fainted and convince Mom to let me blow off today and stay home.
 
It’s peaceful on the floor.
 
But it also smells a bit. I open an eye and there’s something ground into the rug. One of Dandelion’s cat treats, maybe. I turn my head to the other side and it’s better over here, but then from outside I hear a horn blast, and this is my dad.
 
So now I’m up and on my feet because he will just keep honking and honking the stupid horn until I’m in the car. I can’t find one of my books and one of my shoes, and my hair is wrong and my outfit is wrong, and basically I am wrong in my own skin. I should have been born French. If I were French, everything would be right. I would be chic and cool and ride a bike to school, one with a basket. I would be able to ride a bike in the first place. If I were living in Paris instead of Mary Grove, Ohio, these flats would look better with this skirt, my hair would be less orange red—the color of an heirloom tomato—and I would somehow make more sense.
 
I scramble into my parents’ room dressed in my skirt and bikini top, the black one I bought with Saz last month, the one I plan to live in this summer. All my bras are in the wash. My mom’s closet is neat and tidy, but lacking the order of my dad’s, which is all black, gray, navy, everything organized by color because he’s colorblind and this way he doesn’t have to ask all the time, “Is this green or brown?” I rummage through the shelf above and then his dresser drawers, searching for the shirt I want: vintage 1993 Nirvana. I am always stealing this shirt and he is always stealing it back, but now it’s nowhere.
 
I stand in the doorway and shout down the hall, toward the stairs, toward my mom. “Where’s Dad’s Nirvana shirt?” I’ve decided that this and only this is the thing I want to wear today.
 
I wait two, three, four, five seconds, and my only answer is another blast of the horn. I run to my room and grab the first shirt I see and throw it on, even though I haven’t worn it to school since freshman year. Miss Piggy with sparkles.
 
At the front door, my mom says, “I’ll come get you if Saz can’t bring you home.” My mom is a busy, well-known writer—historical novels, nonfiction, anything to do with history—but she always has time for me. When we moved into this house, we turned the guest room into her office and my dad spent two days building floor-to-ceiling bookcases to hold her hundreds of research books.
 
Something must show on my face because she rests her hands on my shoulders and goes, “Hey. It’s going to be okay.” And she means my best friend, Suzanne Bakshi (better known as Saz), and me, that we’ll always be friends in spite of graduation and college and all the life to come. I feel some of her calm, bright energy settling itself, like a bird in a tree, onto my shoulders, melting down my arms, into my limbs, into my blood. This is one of the many things my mom does best. She makes everyone feel better.
 
In the car, my dad is wearing his Radiohead T-shirt under a suit jacket, which means the Nirvana shirt is in the wash. I make a mental note to snag it when I get home so I can wear it to the party tonight.
 
For the first three or four minutes, we don’t talk, but this is also normal. Unlike my mom, my dad and I are not morning people, and on the drive to school we like to maintain what he calls “companionable silence,” something Saz refuses to respect, which is why I don’t ride with her.
 
I stare out the window at the low black clouds that are gathering like mourners in the direction of the college, where my dad works as an administrator. It’s not supposed to rain, but it looks like rain, and it makes me worry for Trent Dugan’s party. My weekends are usually spent with Saz, driving around town, searching for something to do, but this one is going to be different. Last official party of senior year and all.
 
My dad sails past the high school, over Main Street Bridge, into downtown Mary Grove, which is approximately ten blocks of stores lining the bricked-paved streets, better known as the Promenade. He roars to a stop at the westernmost corner, where the street gives way to cobbled brick and fountains. He gets out and jogs into the Joy Ann Cake Shop while I text Saz a photo of the sign over the door. Who’s your favorite person?
 
In a second she replies: You are.
 
Two minutes later my dad is jogging back to the car, arms raised overhead in some sort of ridiculous victory dance, white paper bag in one hand. He gets in, slams the door, and tosses me the bag filled with our usual—one chocolate cupcake for Saz and a pound of thumbprint cookies for Dad and me, which we devour on the way to the high school. Our secret morning ritual since I was twelve.
 
As I eat, I stare at the cloudy, cloudy sky. “It might rain.”
 
My dad says, “It won’t rain,” like he once said, “He won’t hit you,” about Damian Green, who threatened to punch me in the mouth in third grade because I wouldn’t let him cheat off me. He won’t hit you, which implied that if necessary my dad would come over to the school and punch Damian himself, because no one was going to mess with his daughter, not even an eight-year-old boy.
 
“It might,” I say, just so I can hear it again, the protectiveness in his voice. It’s a protectiveness that reminds me of being five, six, seven, back when I rode everywhere on his shoulders.
 
He says, “It won’t.”
 
In first-period creative writing, my teacher, Mr. Russo, keeps me after class to say, “If you really want to write, and I believe you do, you’re going to have to put it all out there so that we can feel what you feel. You always seem to be holding back, Claudine.”
 
He says some good things too, but this will be what I remember—that he doesn’t think I can feel. It’s funny how the bad things stay with you and the good things sometimes get lost. I leave his classroom and tell myself he doesn’t begin to know me or what I can do. He doesn’t know that I’m already working on my first novel and that I’m going to be a famous writer one day, that my mom has let me help her with research projects since I was ten, the same year I started writing stories. He doesn’t know that I actually do put myself out there.
 
On my way to third period, Shane Waller, the boy I’ve been seeing for almost two months, corners me at my locker and says, “Should I pick you up for Trent’s party?”
 
Shane smells good and can be funny when he puts his mind to it, which—along with my raging hormones—are the main reasons I’m with him. I say, “I’m going with Saz. But I’ll see you there.” Which is fine with Shane, because ever since I was fifteen, my dad has notoriously made all my dates wait outside, even in the dead of Ohio winter. This is because he was once a teenage boy and knows what they’re thinking. And because he likes to make sure they know he knows exactly what they’re thinking.
 
Shane says, “See you there, babe.” And then, to prove to myself and Mr. Russo and everyone else at Mary Grove High that I am an actual living, feeling person, I do something I never do—I kiss him, right there in the school hallway.
 
When we break apart, he leans in and I feel his breath in my ear. “I can’t wait.” And I know he thinks—hopes—we’re going to have sex. The same way he’s been hoping for the past two months that I’ll finally decide my days of being a virgin are over and “give it up to him.” (His words, not mine. As if somehow my virginity belongs to him.)

Editorial Reviews

08/10/2020

Claude’s family is a perfect unit of three, until, on the verge of her high school graduation, her parents tell her that they’re splitting up. She’s already filled with uncertainty—will she and her best friend, Saz, stay connected after school ends? Will she lose her virginity? Become the writer she wants to be?—and now the floor feels like it’s been pulled out from under her, even more so when her mother whisks her to a remote island off Georgia’s coast (“This is what it feels like to be exiled”). There, Claude tries to imagine being brave, even as she begins a potentially risky and exciting relationship with handsome, nature-loving Jeremiah, called “Miah.” Niven (Holding Up the Universe) describes this as her most personal novel, which comes through in both the book’s flaws and its strengths. The story begins slowly, and Claude’s torrent of emotions—wanting and not wanting Miah, hating and not hating her father, loving and resenting her mother and best friend—can feel overdescribed. But Niven intimately and sensually depicts Claude’s determination to know herself and her body, and to genuinely connect not just with Miah but with herself. Ages 14–up. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 09/01/2020

Gr 9 Up—Claude is finishing up her senior year of high school in Ohio and making plans for an epic summer before going off to college. That's when Claude's dad drops the floor out from under her: Her mother and father are separating. Instead of her fabulous summer with her best friend, Claude is going to stay with her mother on a remote island off the coast of Georgia with no cell reception. She meets a group of misfit teens who quickly become friends. One of those misfits is Jeremiah. Soon Claude and Miah are exploring the island, new emotions, and each other in a dreamy, responsible, Sarah Dessen-like affair. Angry, whiny Claude is difficult to like at first but believable. Sun-bronzed Miah, despite his troubled past, is almost too perfect, yet readers will find themselves drawn to his wise-beyond-his-years optimism. He helps Claude begin to accept what her family is going through. As the last days of summer pass by, Claude and her mother find ways to accept heartbreak and face their new realities. This bittersweet summer romance is a change of pace for Niven, but it is easy to feel her connection to the story. Discussions about love, sex, family, and the conflicting emotions caused by change are refreshingly honest. Claude is white and some of the islanders are Gullah. VERDICT A recommended purchase for any YA collection where romance and/or realistic fiction circulates well.—Claire Covington, Broadway H.S., VA

School Library Journal

2020-07-14
An 18-year-old girl experiences a summer of self-discovery.

At the end of her senior year of high school, Claudine “Claude” Henry is ready to lose her virginity to Wyatt Jones (who’s unaware of this plan)—and then hopes to go on a road trip before college with her best friend, Suzanne “Saz” Bakshi. But when her parents reveal they’re separating, Claude is devastated by her father’s statement that he can’t cope anymore with his life. So Claude goes with her mother for the summer to a small island off the coast of Georgia, where she befriends some of the locals. She’s drawn to Jeremiah “Miah” Crew, a summer resident, and they agree that since they’re both leaving the island in a month, they won’t take their fling for anything serious. Claude and her friends share smart, candid thoughts about safe sex, consent, and pleasure, woven seamlessly into the emotional first-person narrative along with touching meditations on friendship and family. A storyline exploring Claude’s great-aunt’s history on the island ends up convoluted and uninspired, but overall Claude’s journey is intriguing. Claude and Miah are White, Wyatt is biracial (White/Black), and brown-skinned Saz is a lesbian.

A sex-positive summer romance that’s worth reading. (Romance. 14-18)

Kirkus Reviews

"Romantic and sexy." —Judy Blume, acclaimed author of Forever

"A coming-of-age story that will make your heart ache." —PopSugar

"[A] bittersweet summer romance.... Discussions about love, sex, family, and the conflicting emotions caused by change are refreshingly honest." —SLJ, starred review

"A sex-positive summer romance that’s worth reading." —Kirkus Reviews

"Niven describes this as her most personal novel.... [She] intimately and sensually depicts Claude’s determination to know herself and her body, and to genuinely connect not just with Miah but with herself.” —Publishers Weekly

"Breathless is a frank and tender novel of self-discovery that fans of Sarah Dessen’s transformational summer romances and John Green’s stories of poignant self-discovery and difficult growth will enjoy.” —BookPage

From the Publisher