Angela Readman’s Something like Breathing pairs nuanced observations with an atmospheric setting to tell an evocative story of growing up with a secret ... Secret love affairs, deep-seated regrets and yearnings for comfort, fears that shape the course of relationships: these are all made painfully plain to the reader, while astute Lorrie misses them even as she describes the world around her in her own words. This painstakingly rendered, gorgeous novel is pervaded by a sense of tense mystery while maintaining a close narrative distance. Something like Breathing is a skilled and beautiful portrait of a wonderful gift masked as darkness.
Readman’s novel starts with a whimper and ends with a bang. During the slow-paced opening sections we could be forgiven for thinking this is a gentle rose-tinted tale of cozy camaraderie and adolescent escapades. But as Readman expands, she casts shadows over the lives of her two main characters and highlights the trials, quandaries and agonies of the adults around them ... Beautifully bittersweet, this first novel is a rich evocation of youth and a joyous celebration of individuality.
...slightly off-kilter strangeness ... Something Like Breathing isn’t as obviously bizarre as some of [Readman's] shorter fiction, but it still carries with it the whisper of weirdness. It couldn’t accurately be described as magical realism, but it is a book in which strange, unexplained things happen. Readman is less interested in whys and wherefores, instead her focus is on how her characters negotiate what they encounter ... Though the narrative has a slightly unsteady flow—the revelation about Sylvie seems a little too long in coming to the fore—Readman weaves a fascinating and decidedly original fairytale.
Readman’s debut novel paints a vivid picture of coming-of-age on that gloomy island in the 1950s, using distinct narrative voices to drive the well-paced revelations. The complicated, almost sisterly friendship between Lorrie and Sylvie will remind readers of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (2012), and the hint of magic will appeal to fans of Alice Hoffman’s darker work.
Despite minor flaws and a relatively small scope, however, Something Like Breathing is an auspicious work from a writer unusually skilled with language and subtext. It’s a sad, serious, beautiful novel worth diving into head first.
... it’s incidental to the comparisons that have been drawn with Angela Carter, and one can see why with the plethora of animal and fairy-tale symbolism that seems to lie beneath the story ... Whilst Readman’s taste isn’t as baroque as Carter’s, there’s a sense that sexual knowledge comes with a sacrifice ... there are some really lovely images deployed throughout Something Like Breathing, and although Readman might be criticized for an overuse of similes, some of them truly glow in your mind after finishing the novel.
A curious, sometimes-comic tale of female friendship set on a remote Scottish island fuses the bizarre, the banal, and the miraculous ... Readman’s quirky story happily evokes the texture of daily life in a distant place and era ... Odd and slightly out-of-kilter, Readman’s narrative has an essential deadpan charm, dotted with striking, sideways observations, yet her inventive premise, once launched, seems to run short of ideas as to where it might go. Nevertheless, and despite its simplicity, the story lends itself to multiple layers of interpretation and metaphor—the limits of friendship; mythmaking; the unavoidable exploration of self—and ends with a breezy admission of life’s opacity. An offbeat, enigmatic parable of otherness and attachment, with a style to match.
