Thank you NetGalley and Publisher for allowing me to read and review this book.

I very much enjoyed this book. The writing was great and the characters were well developed. I hope to read more from this author in the future.

I'm still not quite sure how I feel about this one. I flew through this book, but it felt underdeveloped and left me wanting more. This story follows Nat as she struggles with addiction, eventually landing her in a rehabilitation center out in California.

From the beginning, we know that Nat had several factors that led to her addiction: pressure from her Olympic swimming career, her best friend being diagnosed with cancer, and an abusive boyfriend who introduced her to drugs. That being said, all of those issues were touched on so lightly that I don't know why they were mentioned at all; including all of these issues but not developing them made the story feel scattered. While I understand the main focus was on Nat's recovery, I found her character underdeveloped and all of these issues simply grazed over. The letters to Annie helped provide more insight, but I think a dual timeline POV with different flashbacks with these scenarios would provide better context and character development.

The other issue I had with this was how unrealistically optimistic this story was. Yes, I understand it's YA, but if an author is going to tackle something as serious as addiction, I would hope they do it authentically. Sure, there are exceptions to the rule, but it feels incredibly unlikely that a girl who faced verbal abuse, assault, addiction, absent parents, and the terminal illness of her best friend would bounce back in a matter of months and have NO setbacks. It felt more like the author wanted to include as much shock value as possible for edge and entertainment without properly fleshing it out.

I really wanted to like this book and think it had a lot of potential, but it felt unfinished and very surface-level to me. Thank you for the ARC.

Treading Water by Daniella Blue was a very entertaining read. It is a book that I’d recommend picking up on publication day.