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by A. J. Steiger
A heartbreaking debut YA romance featuring a neuroatypical girl with a tragic history and the chronically ill boy trying to break the vault encasing her heart.
Alvie Fitz doesn't fit in, and she doesn't care. She's spent years swallowing meds and bad advice from doctors and social workers. Adjust, adapt. Pretend to be normal. It sounds so easy.
If she can make it to her eighteenth birthday without any major mishaps, she'll be legally emancipated. Free. But if she fails, she'll become a ward of the state and be sent back to the group home.
All she wants is to be left alone to spend time with her friend, Chance, the one-winged hawk at the zoo where she works. She can bide her time with him until her emancipation. Humans are overrated anyway.
Then she meets Stanley, a boy who might be even stranger than she is - a boy who walks with a cane, who turns up every day with a new injury, whose body seems as fragile as glass. Without even meaning to, she finds herself getting close to him. But Alvie remembers what happened to the last person she truly cared about.
Her past stalks her with every step, and it has sharp teeth. But if she can find the strength to face the enemy inside her, maybe she'll have a chance at happiness after all.
"Starred Review. A gorgeous love story of depth and raw emotion that beautifully dismantles the ugly perceptions of autism." - Kirkus
"Alvie is an empathetic and likable character who struggles with her shortcomings and knows her strengths. Readers will want to console her when she hits rock bottom and swoon alongside her at the satisfying conclusion. Grades 9-12." - Booklist
"At last! A.J. Steiger's When My Heart Joins the Thousand offers a love story between two atypical characters with breathtaking honesty about all the messy aspects of real love - sex, compatibility, trust, and most of all, honesty." - Cammie McGovern, author of Say What You Will
This information about When My Heart Joins the Thousand was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
A.J. Steiger has lived her entire life in the Chicago area. She's a graduate of Columbia College, where she majored in fiction writing.
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