A review by manwithanagenda
Drowning Practice by Mike Meginnis

challenging emotional mysterious reflective tense slow-paced

4.0

Now, this was strange enough for me. 'Drowning Practice' begins some months after the world wakes up from a mass-dream that the world is ending in a year. Details vary from person to person and culture to culture, but the end result is the same. After a conversation with a kindly, authoratative person, you are lead to a pool of water and drowned. Everyone had the dream.

The world slowly goes mad. 

We hear of this only from the perspective of a precocious young girl and her agoraphobic mother suffering from writer's block and a few other things, with some insight from the girl's obsessive father. While there is violence as a result of this news, there seems mostly to be a confused atmosphere of despair. There are those who deny the dream, but mostly fail to convince themselves. The parts of the world that continue to function do so only out of habit.

'Drowning Practice' is a bit of a funhouse mirror of a novel, reflecting the world and our problems in a new way.