Review : Heartbeat by Elizabeth Scott
Heartbeat by Elizabeth Scott
Pages : 304
Genre : YA, Contemporary fiction
Stand alone
My Rating : 4/5
About the Book :
But Emma can’t tell her mother anything. Because her mother is brain-dead and being kept alive by machines for the baby growing inside her.
Meeting bad-boy Caleb Harrison wouldn’t have interested Old Emma. But New Emma-the one who exists in a fog of grief, who no longer cares about school, whose only social outlet is her best friend Olivia-New Emma is startled by the connection she and Caleb forge.
Feeling her own heart beat again wakes Emma from the grief that has grayed her existence. Is there hope for life after death-and maybe, for love?
My Thoughts :
It’s only my second time experiencing the words of Elizabeth Scott (the first one being the very troubling Living Dead Girl) but wow, does the author know how to break your heart! Heartbeat is, without a doubt, one of the most heartbreaking YA novel I have read in a while, and while it didn’t bring the same level of despair as Living Dead Girl, it definitely shook me up.
The theme is heavy, for sure, and I honestly don’t know what to think about it. It is both scary and amazing what science can achieve, to be able to maintain alive a woman who “died” weeks ago, so that her baby has a chance to survive. It was horrific, how Emma described her mother; there but not there, her body decaying in front of her, knowing that she would never be able to talk to her again.
I can’t imagine going through something like that, but the author did a great job of portraying Emma’s feelings of grief, despair, hurt, scare, powerlessness. I felt all those things while reading Heartbeat, and I had to take a breather here and there because the sadness of it all was too much to bear.
I loved both Caleb and Olivia, and what they each brought to Emma’s life. Her relationship with her step-father was so tense that it was a relief to see these two, even though Caleb’s story wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns. I felt that they complemented each other well.
All in all, Heartbeat was certainly a great reading experience. Packing this much anger and pain and sadness into one single book is impressive; but on top of that, the novel also offers an intimate view on a controversial theme, one I hadn’t yet encountered in fiction. Now all I want is to get my hands on more of Elizabeth Scott’s books, and see what other emotional roller-coaster she can bring me on.
Heartbeat is available for sale now! Thanks to Harlequin Teen for generously providing a digital copy of the book for this review.
I love books full of emotion like that. It sure sounds like Scott can write!
I love Elizabeth Scott and I enjoyed this book too. She’s really great at dealing with extremely heavy subjects in a way that makes you fall in love with her characters and root for a good outcome.
Nice review. I haven’t read anything by the author, so this will probably be the book I try by her.