Learning to Float. A bittersweet, fiercely honest YA novel about teen mental health, an unlikely alliance, a long-kept secret, first love, and the slow, stubborn work of learning to keep your head above water

Seventy-two hours. No phone. No way out. Maya didn't sign up for this. Her mother drove her up the hill to Port Blossom, handed over her cracked phone like it was something Maya shouldn't have, and called it doing the right thing. "I'm doing a thing, " Maya told her. Now she's inside the Adolescent Intensive Program. A waiting room that smells like lemon Pledge and somebody's anxiety. A boy named DeShawn cracking his knuckles, telling her it's not that bad. Back home, Leo's last message is still unanswered: I'll be here when you get out. She doesn't know if that's true.
She doesn't know if she wants it to be. There are rules here she didn't read before she signed. There's a scoreboard that lies, a meditation cage, a black-box session nobody talks about. And there are folders, locked in a back office, that hold the truth about what this place really does to the kids who can't pay their own way out. Maya came in counting the seconds between the harbor bell's clangs, just trying to survive three days. But seventy-two hours turns into something longer. And the longer she stays, the clearer it gets: somebody is using these kids, and Maya is being groomed to be next. "If you walk out that back door, " DeShawn warns her, "you don't just save yourself.
You burn it all down." Maya has spent so long staying quiet that she's forgotten she has a voice at all. She has a secret she's never said out loud, and a talent she's let drown. To get free, she'll have to trust the last people she expected. She'll have to open the file she was never meant to see. And she'll have to decide who she's becoming, before this place decides for her. Learning to Float is a bittersweet, fiercely honest YA novel about teen mental health, an unlikely alliance, a long-kept secret, first love, and the slow, stubborn work of learning to keep your head above water. Perfect for readers who love emotional contemporary YA, mental-health stories, found family, quiet resilience, and books like All the Bright Places and Turtles All the Way Down.
A standalone YA novel with a tender, hopeful ending.