The Drowning Lesson~ Jane Shemilt

The Drowning Lesson by Jane Shemilt was a spontaneous train station purchase a few years ago. In fact, I think it might have been the first piece of adult fiction that I personally bought for myself.

The book follows Doctor Emma Jordan and her family. Her husband Adam (also a Doctor) is given the opportunity to go to Botswana for a research placement. The family goes out to Africa for what is a memorable trip, but for all the wrong reasons. Emma comes back to find an empty cot and that their baby son has been kidnapped.

Reading this for the first time, sitting on the train minutes after it had been purchased, I was immediately caught up in the missing baby drama. That’s what I remember most out of the book’s events. Rereading this, I realised that I misremembered how irritating the character of Emma was.

Emma is an extremely competitive person and everything in her life is about winning, even her marriage. She and Adam are both successful doctors (in different fields), but Emma has to be ahead of Adam in her career. She views each of his successes as a new challenge for her to compete with and it’s an annoying trait that instantly makes you dislike Emma. Thankfully, when baby Sam goes missing, her distraught is real and the competitiveness fades as more important things take over. Shemilt wrote Emma’s distress as something that does elicit a feeling of sympathy.

The narrative of The Drowning Lesson isn’t linear. The prologue is the moment Emma finds out that Sam is gone. The next chapter is set in London a year beforehand when Adam tells Emma of the Botswana opportunity. For the next half of the novel, we flash between London before the trip and Botswana before everything happens. It then becomes one chronological narrative after Sam is taken. It’s a little confusing at some points to remember when exactly the chapter is taking place as sometimes there are time jumps between two chapters in the same location.

Last time I read this, I gave it four stars, I think I was just too caught up in the drama of trying to find Sam. This time Emma’s behaviour irritated me too much and her relationship with Adam seemed to be on the border of being toxic. The story from when Sam is kidnapped is really well written and it’s hard to not feel sorry for Emma, so, I can only give The Drowning Lesson by Jane Shemilt three stars.

C

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