Instructions for a Secondhand Heart by Tamsyn Murray
Genre: YA Realistic Fiction
Blurb (on back of book):
A moving novel about grief, guilt, and the unpredictability of love, for fans of Everything, Everything and All the Bright Places.
Jonny knows better than anyone that life is full of cruel ironies. He's spent every day in a hospital hooked up to machines to keep his heart ticking. Then when an organ donor is found for Jonny's heart, that turns out to be the cruelest irony of all. Because for Jonny's life to finally start, someone else's had to end.
That someone turns out to be Neve's twin brother, Leo. When Leo was alive, all Neve wanted was for him (and all his glorious, overshadowing perfection) to leave. Now that Leo's actually gone forever, Neve has no idea how to move forward. Then Jonny walks into her life looking for answers, her brother's heart beating in his chest, and everything starts to change.
Together, Neve and Jonny will have to face the future, no matter how frightening it is, while learning to heal their hearts, no matter how much it hurts.
(Features select graphic novel illustrations from Jonny's sketchbook.)
MY OPINION: ****
Bonus Summer Reading Challenge #8: A sad book
Although my rating might throw you off, I genuinely enjoyed this book. I thought it was both sad and realistic, which is fairly hard to depict. Grief comes in many different forms and I liked how this book portrayed it.
This book was unique for me for a variety of reasons.
1. One of the two protagonists, Jonny, is a robot. No, he’s not an actual robot, though that would also be a new area for me. He’s lived a large part of his life with a metal heart pumping his blood for him. He has a heart problem that results with him living most of his life in the hospital. He has a rare type of blood so finding an organ donor is more difficult. Also, it means that somebody has to die in order for him to live, which is a depressing idea to live with for the rest of your life.
2. The protagonists are fifteen. This really threw me off because I spend the majority of my time reading about protagonists who are at least over sixteen. I vary between 17-21 and reading about somebody who is my age basically was strange. This also led to the three-star rating. These characters were so convinced that they were in love with each other and I couldn’t believe it. I mean, thinking about all of the immature fifteen-year-olds in my own grade makes me doubt the validity of a full-blown love between these two. Yes, there may be affection and to take the kid’s terms, they may “like-like” each other, but do they really love each other? Not to say that love doesn’t exist for those around my age but how do they truly know what they are feeling? To me, there didn’t seem to be a large amount of chemistry between the two, but maybe that’s just my interpretation. I didn’t feel a “love” in this book like how there generally is in other books. But maybe it has nothing to do with age and I just misinterpreted their relationship.
3. Neve (I have no idea how to pronounce her name), is a twin. And that boy is the person whose heart Jonny finally ends up with. This is not a spoiler because it’s very prominent at the very beginning and is also summarized in the blurb. I can’t imagine how it must have felt to be so happy that you finally have a heart and you can leave the hospital and be happy and also realize that somebody died to give you that heart and that somebody else out there is sad and crying for them. I think that’s what made this book so unique: the fact that Jonny dealt with such a conflicting and difficult situation.
4. I will admit I was very close to tears in this book for reasons that I will not disclose, seeing as they are very large spoilers. If a book can make me cry, I feel like that automatically makes it better because it managed to invoke such emotion out of me. I didn’t cry, but I was very close. The emotion throughout the book is palpable and feels very real. I read this book fairly quickly and maybe that’s why I was more susceptible because I had gone through such an amazing journey in such a short amount of time.
5. The writing is powerful and able to be felt but some passages made me feel as if she was writing like any other author out there. This is no hate, just an opinion. I feel like it’s hard to write your own work when it feels as if everybody’s already written it. However, the style of writing was pretty and brought me to a place beyond this world and that’s really all that matters.
I would recommend this book to readers looking for a sad, heartfelt, and emotional teenage contemporary novel.
Main Character: Neve, Jonny
Sidekick(s): Em, parents, etc
Villain(s): Death, accidents, etc
Realistic Fiction Elements: This book was all very real to life.
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