About a middle-school kid on a varsity swim team. He’s struggling because most of the other boys on the team are older, in high school. Plus he has problems at home- with his parents recently separated, overhearing arguments that makes him fear it will get worse, causing high levels of stress and anxiety. He frets about this all day and sits through the boredom of school, looking forward to swim practice where he can just focus on moving through the water, trying to better his time. Impressing his teammates is another story. They’re trying to qualify for a higher level meet through some preliminaries, and he’s on the relay team but the older boys think his performance will drag them down. Unfortunately swimming is no longer the escape it used to be- flashback memories of things going wrong at home keep interrupting his focus. But by the end of the story he’s started to work some things out (even though the situation with his parents didn’t improve) and is able to not only push some distracting thoughts aside, but to hold onto the positive of other memories, mostly having to do with why he loves to be in the water. I liked this one because I was on a high school swim team myself, so there was a lot of familiarity there. Some of the writing felt a little rough, the bits of story fitted together a tad too perfectly to make a point, if you know what I mean. Like the other books in this series, there’s a small glossary and a bit of trivia on the sport at the end. No author bio for the ghostwriter in this one, though (the skate park volume had that).
Borrowed from the public library.
