Readers' rating:
Published Feb 2010
224 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
When a small mistake costs sixteen-year-old Eagan her life during a figure-skating competition, she leaves many things unreconciled, including her troubled relationship with her mother. From her vantage point in the afterlife, Eagan reflects back on her memories, and what she could have done differently, through her still-beating heart.
When fourteen-year-old Amelia learns she will be getting a heart transplant, her fear and guilt battle with her joy at this new chance at life. And afterwards when she starts to feel different—dreaming about figure skating, craving grape candy—her need to learn about her donor leads her to discover and explore Eagan’s life, meeting her grieving loved ones and trying to bring the closure they all need to move on.
Told in alternating viewpoints, In a Heartbeat tells the emotional and compelling story of two girls sharing one heart.
"The book's climax ... feels manufactured and somewhat rushed, but the emotions of the two protagonists are painstakingly fine-tuned. Readers will likely come away teary eyed and inspired to become organ donors themselves. Ages 12–up." - Publishers Weekly
"Ellsworth’s dramatic story of loss and second chances is deftly tempered by its candid teen narration and light touches of mystery and romance, making it a highly satisfying read" - Booklist
This information about In a Heartbeat 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.
Loretta Ellsworth is the author of three novels for young readers, In a Heartbeat, The Shrouding Woman, and In Search of Mockingbird, which won the 2007 Midwest Bookseller’s Choice Award Honor Book for Children’s Literature, and was named to the 2008 New York Library List of Teenage Books. She lives in Minnesota.
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