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Sixteen and living in a small Michigan town, Gertie is harboring a secret heavy enough to fracture her closest friendship.
I'd been raised on secrets, I knew they weren't a good idea.
She and Cindy have been bonded since birth by the fact their fathers are addicts, and their unsteady home lives are a little easier when they're together, sprawled on a trampoline with pilfered vodka and dreams of moving to New York.
Everything was changing so fast. I didn't know what was real.
After an accident involving a bonfire and an aerosol canister sends Gertie to the hospital, she finds herself with nowhere to go but to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to live with her newly sober father. She sees it as a chance to escape the hometown drama she's caused, but drama finds her all the same: parties without curfews, boys without boundaries, a compromising photo, tragedy back home ... and her father, once again teetering on the edge of oblivion. Terrified of the consequences of being honest with Cindy, her sole refuge is the fantasy novel she's writing, a portal to another world and the story of a young girl roaming a strange land, trusting her wits to survive.
I had to become a different, stronger person before I'd even figured out who I was in the first place.
Years later, when ghosts of the past surface, Gertie decides to write again about that explosive summer from the stabler shores of adulthood. Powered by the fierce imagination of her youth, Gertie finally allows herself the grace to tell a version of her narrative that she always hoped would be true.
Written with the feeling and power of a ticking time bomb, Atomic Hearts is an unforgettable story of the relationships that shape us beyond all reason and the ways it might be possible to pull ourselves back from the brink.
"[An] impressive debut novel...This works equally well as a gritty coming-of-age drama and an insightful story about the nature of writing." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"This [feels] quite effortless, mostly through the power of [Cummins's] sharp prose and even sharper insights into, especially, the lives of teenage girls. A promising debut novel about the heavy presence of the past." —Kirkus Review
"Stirring...Captivating and authentic, Cummins' novel is a deeply felt look into the emotional turmoil of trauma, relationships, and coming into one's own." —Booklist
"Brilliant...explores the long path to self-fulfillment, how we discover our place in the world, and what we owe to others along the way...Megan Cummins uncovers the troubling, intricate mystery of human connection, how we survive the worst of it, and sometimes don't. She lays bare how we manage, despite enormous hurdles, to collapse the remote distances between us, and how each of us is a portal to worlds unseen." —Sarah Blakely-Cartwright, author of Alice Sadie Celine
"A live scroll on love, loyalty, who we are in our wrongdoings, and how we end up with the one we end up with...Cummins captures all of her characters in their wide and earnest humanness. This novel sustains the empathy it calls for and reminds us that one need not be a saint to achieve redemption. I closed the book at the end, but my heart was still open." —Sidik Fofana, author of Stories from the Tenants Downstairs
This information about Atomic Hearts 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.
Megan Cummins is the author of If the Body Allows It, awarded the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction and longlisted for the Story Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Her stories and essays have appeared in A Public Space, Guernica, One Teen Story, Ninth Letter, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She edits at Public Books, a magazine of arts, ideas, and scholarship. Atomic Hearts is her debut novel.
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