Loghan Paylor is a queer and trans Canadian author who has written a pleasant albeit predictable story about queer love set during the World War II era. The Cure for Drowning is a good novel and worth reading, but I can’t say that this novel really excites me.

The Cure for Drowning is about a ten-year-girl named Kathleen McNair who drowns after falling through ice into a river. Her mother uses Celtic magic to bring her back to life, but Kathleen comes back as a “changeling”. Completely unlike the girl she was before falling through the ice, Kit is a headstrong child who prefers to wear boy’s clothing and eschews everything feminine, and she is constantly in trouble with her parents.

In 1939, just before war breaks out, Kit meets Rebekah Kromer, an elegant young woman whose family had to relocate from Montreal to southern Ontario because of prejudice against German citizens. Rebekah and Kit feel an immediate attraction towards each other and start a passionate love affair, but then Kit’s older brother, Landon, begins courting Rebekah. Their messy love triangle ends abruptly when Rebekah and her family flee back to Montreal and Kit runs away from home.

Kit ends up enlisting in the army under the name Christopher. They join the Royal Air Force and become a bomber navigator during the war. Landon joins the navy. Rebekah is living in Halifax and working for naval intelligence when her path crosses with Landon’s, and she ends up doing a stupid thing that lands her in a predicable predicament. With nowhere else to go, Rebekah ends up back in Ontario living on the McNair farm and eventually reunites with both Kit and Landon after the war ends.

The Cure for Drowning is not so much about society’s issues with queer and transgender people, because Christopher somehow manages to get through years of serving with the Royal Air Force without anyone figuring out their birth sex. Instead, the focus of The Cure for Drowning is more insular, on how the McNair and Kromer families each react to Kit and Rebekah deviating from societal expectations. Family is either going to be your biggest supporter or your cruellest denouncer, as Kit and Rebekah each learn. However, it would have also been interesting to see how Kit and Rebekah navigate their relationship outside of the McNair farm.

It should be obvious if you have been following along with my blog that I enjoy supernatural stories, but I thought the addition of Celtic magic and supernatural beings was not necessary for this story and that it kind of undermines Kit’s transgenderism. Transgender people have always existed in history; there is nothing unusual or supernatural about a woman deciding to live as a man and enlisting in war as one.