So, to start this off, I have to say that this book starts off slow. It's about a woman, who is unnamed, who goes to the cabin she grew up on with her boyfriend, Joe, and her seemingly-happily-married friends, Anna and David, because her father went missing.
At first the novel starts of slow, describing what seems to be a typical vacation. Yet, you can feel that something's about happen, and, as the book progresses, you can see a strange sort of thought process enter the narrator's head. She feels that her father left behind a mystery, a message, that she must unravel. At this point, things start getting interesting, to say the least.
She starts to slowly resent her friends and, since this has shown up at the beginning of the book, we hear even more hinting to a husband and a child she had, but never wanted and abandoned. The book begins to take another turn as she tries to figure out what happened to her father. Meanwhile, she also learns that David and Anna's marriage is not all that happy. The thing with David is that he's extremely sexist. We learn some things about him, scandalous things, and soon he exhibits abusive behavior towards Anna. She begins to tell the narrator of the things he does to her and you can even see him undermining her and even forcing her to do a thing or two against her will. Written in a time where the feminist movement was gaining power, you definitely see the two conflicting themes in the novel.
Yet, those become irrelevant in the end as she enters a primal state where she is run completely on her fear in hopes of finally discovering the whereabouts of her father, despite him being presumed dead. You become absorbed with how she lives and distrust.
Surfacing is truly an absorbing novel, despite it's slow start, and is probably one of the most interesting, albeit strange, psychological thrillers I have read. I give it a lovely four-and-a-half-stars.
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