DROWNING ANNA

The slow but near-total destruction of a bright and talented teenage girl is clinically anatomized in this British import. When Anna Goldsmith, bright and talented, moves from London to the north of England, she is at first embraced by Hayley, the most popular girl in school, and then pushed away in slow, subtle, and absolutely vicious increments. The story opens with Anna’s suicide attempt; to bring the reader in on what led to this, Mayfield (A Time to Be Born, not reviewed, etc.) tells Anna’s story by presenting three parallel narratives. Melanie, a schoolmate and friend, relates the course of Anna’s relationship with Hayley from her arrival some two years before the story opens, when they were 13. Melanie, essentially decent, provides an insider’s look at both Anna’s slow disintegration and the insidious attraction of Hayley’s favor—to which Melanie is in no way immune. Even as Melanie reveals the observer’s viewpoint, Anna’s mother Frances sits in the hospital with her comatose daughter, reflecting on how little she herself had observed of Anna’s decline into desperation. To try to understand, she reads Anna’s diary, the written entries counterpointed by Frances’s own memories of the events recorded. This slow backward and forward unfolding of Anna’s increasing depression is remarkably effective. Most successful is Melanie’s account; that she knowingly allows her genuine friendship with Anna to be undermined by Hayley for the sake of popularity will strike chords of recognition with teen readers, most of whom have a Hayley somewhere in their own lives. Justice for Hayley is less important than Melanie’s and Frances’s realizations of their own failures to nurture Anna; in the end, the story represents a bleakly compelling cautionary tale for teens and their adults. (Fiction. 10-14)