The plot of this young adult novel is implausible, but in a Jodi Picoult sort of way, which uses bizarre stories to raise interesting points.  In Heartbeat, Emma’s mother is brain dead but is being kept alive in the hospital by machines.  The reason for this is that her mother is pregnant, and the aim is to allow the fetus to develop enough for it to survive.  Once it is delivered, the machines will be turned off and her mother’s heart will stop beating.  Emma goes in to talk to her mother’s body nearly every day.  Before her mother died, Emma, at 17 years old, was a stellar student, getting the best grades.  But her mother’s death has completely ruined her life, and she no longer cares about school or the future.  She hates her step-father Dan, and blames him for keeping her mother ‘s body going in order for the baby to be delivered.  Her old consolation is her best friend Olivia, who can still sympathize with her.  Before her mother died, Emma and Dan were very close.  But now, she hates him with passion, and she is horrible to him.  It becomes clear to the reader early on that she is being extremely unfair to Dan, and one of the strengths of the book is that it can still depict her sympathetically even while she is so nasty. 

This book is published by Harlequin Teen, which is a romance publisher, and the love connection here is between Emma and the bad boy of her school, Caleb Harrison, who has a reputation as being weird and dangerous.  Most recently, he stole his father’s car and ran it into a lake.  However, through a random coincidence, she comes to get to know Caleb better and she finds that he has lost his younger sister, and his parents blame him for the death.  This is why Caleb is so troubled.  The fact that he can understand loss and how it can transform one’s life means that Emma and Caleb can understand each other in ways that no one else can, and this means that they come to love each other.  This romance angle has a sort of theoretical sense but makes the novel even less plausible than a Jodi Picoult novel.   Nevertheless, this meeting of hearts formed by trauma is described sweetly and has its own appeal.  There is a sort of happy ending to the book, although given the tortured past of most of the characters, the idea that they can achieve some sort of stable equilibrium seems extremely optimistic. 

© 2014 Christian Perring

Christian Perring, Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York