Working with Iris and his best friend Chip, Theo uncovers increasingly disturbing information that spurs him to confront his past.īrodsky gives Theo a sharply realized interiority. When Theo realizes that some of his ‘memories’ haven’t happened yet, he suspects that he shares his mother’s gift for precognition and that there may be more to the story he’s always told himself about the fire that destroyed his home. As lost memories surface, Theo begins to doubt his own narrative about childhood and his relationship with his Uncle Phil. Under mounting pressure to perform well on the dive team and on his family history project, Theo starts having flashbacks. The good news is that his crush Iris is in his group but even that feels like more stress for Theo. The bad news is that the only way Theo can find out about his family history is by asking his alcoholic grandfather, or his Uncle Phil, both of whom are reluctant to answer his questions. So when Theo is assigned a family history project at school he…freaks out. He blames himself her death as well as his father’s, which followed three years later. Theo has a good reason though–hewas playing with matches the night his house burned down, killing his mother. When Theo is assigned a family history project at school he freaks out. It also describes the situation of Theo Mackey, who’s the captain of the dive team and has a good shot at a scholarship to Stanford–if he can keep the rest of his life from spiraling out of control.

In diving parlance, a ‘dive smack’ occurs when a diver mis-judges their entry and hits the water painfully instead of smoothly. DIVE SMACK ( Amazon), Demetra Brodsky’s debut YA novel, is a fast-paced mystery that conveys both the exhilaration and exhaustion of teen life with a supernatural twist.

Dive Smack by Demetra Brodsky