Stay Afloat:

Young adult fiction has always been about transformation. From first loves to magical quests, from high school drama to dystopian battles, YA stories are filled with characters navigating change. But one theme often gets overlooked: resilience. Not the flashy, heroic kind where someone defeats a villain or saves the world, but the quiet, everyday resilience it takes just to keep going when life is heavy.

Too often, YA novels give us extremes—either characters who are crushed by tragedy or those who rise to impossible challenges with cinematic perfection. What gets lost are the middle spaces, the real spaces, where teens (and adults) live: the days when survival isn’t about winning, it’s about staying afloat.

That’s why I wrote Stay Afloat. It’s part of my Unfiltered Lives series, which explores illness, survival, and the emotional weight of living with borrowed time. The story doesn’t glamorize resilience, nor does it frame struggle as weakness. Instead, it shows what it looks like when a young person faces a tide that threatens to pull them under—and chooses, day after day, to keep their head above water.

For teens living with chronic illness, trauma, or everyday battles that don’t make headlines, representation matters. They deserve to see themselves in stories that honor their reality: that some days, courage looks like getting out of bed. That hope can be fragile, but still powerful. That it’s okay not to be “fixed” or “cured” to still have a story worth telling.

For teens who aren’t living that reality, these stories build empathy. They expand the definition of strength, showing that resilience doesn’t always roar—it often whispers. And in a culture that celebrates hustle, achievement, and constant “leveling up,” YA novels about resilience remind us all that surviving is its own kind of victory.

Stay Afloat isn’t just a book—it’s part of a conversation I believe YA literature needs to have. A conversation about honesty, struggle, and the radical courage it takes to simply keep going. Because sometimes the most powerful thing a character—and a reader—can do is just that: stay afloat.