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by Adina Talve-Goodman
Engaging, funny, and unflinching essays about coming of age as a transplant patient and living each day as a gift.
Adina Talve-Goodman was born with a congenital heart condition and survived multiple operations over the course of her childhood, including a heart transplant at age nineteen. In these seven essays, she tells the story of her chronic illness and her youthful search for love and meaning, never forgetting that her adult life is tied to the loss of another person—the donor of her transplanted heart.
Whether writing about the experience of taking her old heart home from the hospital (and passing it around the Thanksgiving table), a summer camp for young transplant patients, or a memorable night on the town, Talve-Goodman's writing is filled with curiosity, humor, and compassion. Published posthumously, Your Hearts, Your Scars is the work of a writer wise beyond her years, a moving reflection on chance and gratitude, and a testament to hope and kindness.
"[Talve-Goodman] transformed her physical limitations into an outward source of strength, and her vividly drawn essays effectively enlighten and educate... . Heartfelt and richly passionate." —Kirkus Reviews
"Reflective and forthright... . Illustrating the complex experience of organ transplantation and chronic illness, the essays of Your Hearts, Your Scars ... explore what it means to be alive, to have a body, and to come back from the brink of death." —Foreword Reviews
"Ponders the precariousness of life for the chronically ill and disabled [in] seven poignant autobiographical essays about living joyfully and looking for love in spite of chronic illness." —Shelf Awareness
"Your Hearts, Your Scars tells of hearts broken and whole, hearts always shared—by families, by lovers, by transplant recipients and their donors. The book's incisions expose all these beating hearts and the hearts of Adina's reading public, who can only imagine what this visionary artist would have created next." —Rita Charon, MD, PhD, author of Narrative Medicine and The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine
"Adina's writing is incisive and inventive. The energy coursing through her prose is positively contagious. This is not a book to be missed!" —Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, editor-in-chief of Bellevue Literary Review and author of When We Do Harm
This information about Your Hearts, Your Scars 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.
Adina Talve-Goodman (1986–2018) was born in St. Louis with a congenital heart condition and underwent a heart transplant at age nineteen. She went on to graduate from Washington University, and perform internationally at the Academia dell'Arte in Italy and Globe Theater in London. She later become a mentor for Girls Write Now and the managing editor of celebrated literary magazine One Story, and was recognized with the Hadassah Advocacy Award and Bellevue Literary Review Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction. She was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma, caused by post-transplant immunosuppressants, as she was attending the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program and working on what would become her debut collection of essays Your Hearts, Your Scars.
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