Harlequin Teen (January 28, 2014)
ISBN-10: 0373210965
ISBN-13: 978-0373210961
256 pages
Ages 14 +
Pre-order Here for $13.31
My Rating: 3/5
Summary from GoodReads: Life. Death. And...Love?
Emma would give anything to talk to her mother one last time. Tell her about her slipping grades, her anger with her stepfather, and the boy with the bad reputation who might be the only one Emma can be herself with.
But Emma can't tell her mother anything. Because her mother is brain-dead and being kept alive by machines for the baby growing inside her.
Meeting bad-boy Caleb Harrison wouldn't have interested Old Emma. But New Emma-the one who exists in a fog of grief, who no longer cares about school, whose only social outlet is her best friend Olivia-New Emma is startled by the connection she and Caleb forge.
Feeling her own heart beat again wakes Emma from the grief that has grayed her existence. Is there hope for life after death-and maybe, for love?
The Verdict: You know that feeling when a good friend asks you your opinion on something you didn't like but you don't know what to say because you don't want to hurt their feelings? Well that's how I feel about this book.
Of all the books I've read and authors I adore, Elizabeth Scott is the only one who I have actually met and interacted with (albeit via email but I still count that). In fact I'm actually personally named on the acknowledgements page of Heartbeat which instantaneously puts it at the top of my favorites list and means I will be buying a copy to add to my bookshelf :)
But the story itself wasn't my favorite. While I do have to give Ms. Scott huge props for crafting a thought-provoking story, the characters were really hard for me to deal with. Let me start with my thoughts on the actual plot and then I'll move onto the characters though.
The subject matter: Is it ethical to keep a pregnant mother who is pronounced brain-dead alive on life-support in order to save her unborn child? I think it's a very good question and while (as a pregnant woman myself) I had an immediate easy answer, the book really forces you to explore both side soy the issue. As the story progresses you can begin to understand how hard living with a living/dead person can be. How hard it would be for a teenager to have to see their dead parent everyday knowing that despite being able to touch them, they will never actually be able to see that person alive again.
So I liked that original approach and subject, my issues with the story started when the timeline began to unravel. Now maybe this is just because I read an ARC and these issues will be fixed in the final edition… I sure hope so. But as I was reading I felt like absolutely no research was done on pregnancy for this book. I acknowledge that the target teen audience probably wouldn't know better, but as a pregnant woman it just irritated and confused me.
From the very beginning, Emma talks about seeing her mother's belly ripple and move from the baby. Mind you she tells Caleb that at this point her mother is just "nearly 16 weeks" pregnant. It upsets me that no one did the research to learn that at only 15 weeks pregnant, you would not be able to see the baby move inside the belly. It's still too tiny for the mother to even feel it move. Heck, I'm 24 weeks pregnant now and you still can't see Minion moving from the outside.
Plus the timeline really makes no sense. At the end of the book, 43 days becomes this big number that gets thrown around. Now previously they said that the baby just had to hang on until 25 weeks. And at the end they say that day is reached, 43 days after the mother's embolism. But in Emma's first conversation with Caleb she reveals that the embolism happened at 12 weeks of pregnancy and that her mom had nearly 10 more weeks of life-support to get to the 25 weeks from her current 15. I'm sorry but the math just isn't adding up. 43 days is only 6 weeks so what happened to the other 7?Where are these forty-three days coming from?
Those issues aside, the hardest part of this book for me were the characters of Emma and Dan. By chapter 5, I literally was forcing myself to continue. Emma came across as such a self centered, spoiled, immature brat. Her rationale made no sense and her treatment of Dan was unacceptable. As devil's advocate though, Dan was being a jerk especially when he scolds Emma on the tone of her voice because the baby might hear (which is medically impossible at that point) and plays the hurting her mother card.
Pushing through it does get better. Emma still doesn't make sense until she finally talks to Dan in chapter 39 and then you can understand her thought-process a bit better. Fortunately Caleb helps keep you reading up until that point. Without him, it would have been impossible for me to get through it :-/
Lastly, it bugged me that Elizabeth Scott resorted to the exact same setting as Between Here and Forever. Meeting your romantic interest in a hospital which you go to everyday. Seriously? Again? Again like with Miracle, I understand that her current books are reflecting her own personal experiences and having spent a lot of time in hospitals over the past few years, that is going to be in the forefront of her mind. But I miss her old style of creativity :(
In the end, Heartbeat is by no means a bad book her even one that I would recommend not reading. It just wasn't one of my favorites. I will say that I loved her "electronic ghosts" metaphor of voicemails and automatic email replies.
I received a free review copy of this book from the publishers via NetGalley but the opinions expressed here are my own.
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