“This soulful #OwnVoices story explores how love for family and tradition can conflict with personal dignity." - Booklist
“Smoothly woven and intriguing glimpses of Filipino culture, language, and economy pop up throughout this #ownvoices novel.” - Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books
“This emotionally powerful YA debut sensitively portrays the tension between Cory’s American upbringing and attempts to stay true to her cultural roots.” - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Not to be missed." - School Library Journal
“Fantauzzo’s emotional story extends beyond Cory’s search for identity and belonging, adding insights about both historical and metaphorical colonization, while readers are immersed in the uncertainty that surrounds new and ongoing family crises, resentment, and forgiveness.” - Horn Book Magazine
My Heart Underwater is a lovely, magnificent wonder of a novel that will leave you with the rarest of tender heartaches: life-affirming, life-inspiring, life-loving; a heartache of joy and becoming. You won’t walk freely, or willingly, from these pages. - New York Times bestselling author Marjorie Liu
A wise, complex exploration of a young person on the cusp of adulthood as she navigates the in-between: being Filipinx in America and American in the Philippines. Readers who yearn for stories closer to the nuances, contradictions, and messiness of real life will love Cory and root for her.
- Grace Talusan, author of The Body Papers, winner of the Restless Books Prize
Beautifully unsettling and deeply satisfying, My Heart Underwater should be read by all—and it’s a gift to any community, not just the YA community, that such a heartfelt, literary novel is now in our hands. - Gina Apostol, author of Gun Dealers' Daughter, PEN/Open Book Award winner
“A (home)coming out story that rides a deep undercurrent of love.” - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)