The Cure for Drowning by Loghan Paylor

Reviewed by Wendy Hawkin

I was sucked into the current of this unique and memorable historical novel when I heard the author read the beginning aloud at a gathering of local writers in B.C. “It was a bitter afternoon, during one of the worst winters the province had ever seen. A ten-year-old girl walked into the forest with her two brothers and didn’t come out again.” Although it starts with a weather report—which authors are advised NOT to do—the question “what happened?” hooked me and hooked us all.

Beginning in Orangeville, Ontario in January 1931, the story of the girl and her brothers, Landon and Jem, morphs into something of epic proportions. When pulled from the clutches of the icy, whispering river by her brothers, the girl, known then as Kathleen or Kitty, is dead. And yet, like a princess in a fairy tale, after three days of Gaelic prayers, lamb broth, and sleep, a child is reborn with no memory of the past. “A changeling,” declares her Irish mother.

This all happens in the unmarked prologue.

When the gracious, intuitive Rebekah arrives in April 1939, she’s drawn into in a sensual, intimate relationship with the changeling Kit, but is also attracted to her handsome older brother, Landon. Though he feels peripheral and, perhaps, proper. Thinking Rebekah has chosen Landon, Kit hops a freight train, talks a scared, young boy out of his sign-up letter, and changes identity. Christopher McNair arises, joins the RAF, and disappears overseas to become a brilliant bomber navigator. Fearless and laced with fey luck, Christopher finds his own crowd of misfits in the air force. Landon joins the navy, and Rebekah works for naval intelligence in Halifax—which is where she spends a memorable night with Landon. And so, the war affects them all.

An epic Canadian saga, The Cure for Drowning, paints a picture of queer and transgender people with innovative charm. Anchored in history, but laced with love and wizardry, Paylor reveals their clandestine role in the military and the discrimination they faced, both under Hitler’s regime and within their own allied units. It’s not until Kit returns to their first loves in 1947—Rebekah and the farm—that pronouns change: “It was as though a skilled sculptor had taken a chisel to every feature and fashioned them into a sharper, purer version. The one I’d always seen, underneath,” Rebekah says.

This is Paylor’s debut novel, but their lush, masterful voice foretells a future in Can Lit. One of those unique souls who make complex writing seem a breeze—like they rest their fingertips on the keyboard and out flies music and magic—Paylor is as adept at riveting wartime action as soft sensual intimacy. An epic page-turner, laced with myth, romance and mystery, yet anchored at a time of brutal history and the landscape of place, The Cure for Drowning draws us deep into the river and keeps us there holding our breath until the very last page.

Loghan Paylor is a queer, trans author with an MA in Creative Writing from UBC. Their short fiction and essays have been published in “Prairie Fire” and “Room.” The Cure for Drowning was named a Globe and Mail Best Book of 2024, longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize, and is shortlisted for the Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes 2025—literature with “a sense of vitality and urgency that breaks boundaries and blazes new paths within their genre.” This is an author to watch and a must-read novel.

The Cure for Drowning is published by Random House Canada.

W. L. Hawkin writes urban fantasy and romantic suspense with Blue Haven Press in British Columbia.