Drowning instinct

Overview

Ilsa J. Bick's Drowning Instinct opens with sixteen-year-old Jenna Lord already carrying more damage than most adults could manage. Her father is domineering, her mother drinks to cope, and the brother she once relied on has been sent overseas with the military. A fire that nearly killed her has left its own scars, physical and otherwise, and Jenna narrates her story to a stranger in a way that signals from the first pages that something has gone badly wrong.

Into this unstable life comes Mitch Anderson, her science teacher and swim coach, a man who is by every outward measure respected, married, and kind. The novel traces how admiration curdles into something else as Jenna and Mitch grow closer, and it refuses to let readers settle into a simple read of either character. Bick withholds easy judgment, letting the relationship's intimacy and its wrongness exist side by side.

What results is less a romance than a slow unraveling, told from inside the perspective of a girl who may not have the distance to see her own peril clearly. The suspense comes not from plot mechanics but from watching a reader's sympathy get pulled in directions it knows it shouldn't go.

A Story Built on Discomfort

Bick, who has written across horror and psychological thriller territory for young adult readers, uses Drowning Instinct to work against the conventions of the "troubled girl falls for her teacher" narrative. The book's framing device, Jenna recounting events after the fact to an unnamed listener, keeps the reader aware that this is a story being reconstructed, not experienced in real time, and that the reconstruction itself may be unreliable.

The novel sits within a broader body of young adult fiction that treats abuse and grooming not as a simple villain-and-victim morality play but as something that happens inside relationships that also contain real tenderness, attention, and need. That ambiguity is the book's central argument: that calling someone purely a monster or purely a victim can obscure how these dynamics actually take hold. It is also precisely what has made the novel controversial, since presenting a predatory relationship with any emotional complexity risks being read as sympathy for the predator rather than an indictment of the structures that let him operate.

Why Drowning Instinct Has Been Challenged

Most objections to the book target its suitability for high school readers, the age group it was written for and the one most likely to encounter it in a classroom or school library collection. Critics argue that the detailed depiction of a sexual relationship between a student and a teacher is inappropriate for teenage readers regardless of the narrative's ultimate framing of that relationship as damaging.

The challenges also center on the book's frank treatment of self-harm, family dysfunction including alcoholism and emotional abuse, and sexual content that some reviewers consider explicit for its intended audience. Because the novel spends much of its length inside Jenna's affection for Mitch before fully exposing the manipulation underlying it, some challengers contend that the book risks normalizing or romanticizing grooming rather than clearly condemning it, even though the narrative ultimately undercuts that reading. According to the records tracked in this catalog, Drowning Instinct has been the subject of a challenge in one state and one school district.