Heartbeat

by Elizabeth Scott

Emma's mother is on life support with a living baby growing inside of her. Estranged from her stepfather, the only person she can turn to is her best friend. Then bad-boy Caleb Harrison comes along and reminds her that there just might be life and love after death and grief.

• ISBN10: 1306155045
• ISBN13: 9781306155045
• Publish Date: 1 January 2014
• Publish Status: Active
• Out of Print: 25 February 2015
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Harlequin Teen
• Format: eBook
• Language: English

Reviews

[Kelly]

http://www.divabooknerd.com/2014/04/heartbeat-by-elizabeth-scott.html
Heartbeat is an incredibly emotional journey about letting go, healing and learning to live again. Emma has never felt more alone, the only person she felt ever truly loved her, is being kept alive by the man who was supposed to have loved her. Stepfather Dan has raised Emma as his own child and the small family unit was happy, healthy and safe. After two years of trying, Dan was thrilled to become a father, but Emma believes her mother only wanted the baby to satisfy Dan, and was scared to go through another pregnancy at her age. So when Emma's mother died, Dan made the decision to keep her mother's body alive and Emma is incredibly angry.

Emma deal with her grief through anger, she's angry with Dan for assuming he knew what Emma's mother wanted, and she's angry at her unborn half brother. She cares about little other than how she feels and has shut Dan out of her life. Under any other circumstance, Emma's character would be highly criticised, but she's distraught and her pain and inner conflict are confronting and raw. Her pain leaps off each pain and I found it irritating, emotional and equally as distressing. It isn't until she starts spending time with Caleb, that she begins to find an outlet and can breath again.

Caleb isn't without his own issues, and is justified in his own rage. He doesn't want to fix Emma, nor take her pain away. He simply offers comfort and support and shows Emma that she isn't alone. I liked Emma well enough, but her behavior became tedious annoying. She's grieving, but as other character also mentions, she uses that to justify her anger and how she treats her loving step father is deplorable. But Elizabeth Scott is incredibly clever, she's created Emma who the majority of readers will want to throttle, but given she's deeply grieving, most readers won't criticise her character. When your grieving, most people will excuse your behavior, and Heartbeat won't be any different.

But I really enjoyed it, despite Emma. It was incredibly raw and confronting and brought a maturity to the young adult genre rarely seen with most new releases.

[Joséphine]

Actual rating: 3.5 stars

Heartbeat was a relatively good book for me, although I didn't think it was exceptional. No matter how much I tried, I couldn't connect emotionally. For a book such as this, not connecting emotionally feels like a downfall because the whole concept of it is actually very heartbreaking. Instead, I felt rather detached. Maybe because the protagonist, Emma, was such a detestable character. The subject matter and plot however were original, which is why my interest in the book itself didn't waver all too much.

Emma was so self-absorbed and so filled with self-pity, I felt a strong urge to shake her for at least half of the book. But I did understand her to some degree. Through an inexplicable feat, she managed to make sense as the world's most spoilt brat on earth. I could see why she was so upset but she was so self-involveded, I found it difficult to care much about her.

Still, the issue about life and death definitely got me thinking. While I disagreed completely with Emma's assessment of the whole situation, seeing her brain-dead mother couldn't have been easy in any sense of the word. It's natural that she was overcome with such an exceeding grief. Yet taking her mother off life support wouldn't have been any easier a decision. That's the core of Heartbeat that made me read on—the moral dilemma of sustaining a life.

Moral ambiguity is always difficult to grapple with, especially when it causes such great emotional distress for everyone involved. Weighing the costs of particular choices can't be measured in absolute terms, so the explorations of life and death, love and hate, were extremely difficult in this novel. It's stories like these that make me appreciate fiction more because it allows us to think about our own lives and reflect on who we are and what we believe in.

This review is also available on dudettereads.com.

[Leah]

Elizabeth Scott is quite famous in the Young Adult world, with numerous novels and awards to her name, but I have somehow missed the chance to read her time and time again. Which surprises me, I don’t read as much YA as I would like, but I try to read some, and I’m a bit disappointed in myself for taking so long to become acquainted with Elizabeth’s work. Especially as she’s very highly regarded as a writer. So when I downloaded Heartbeat to my Kindle, I made sure to stick it in my diary as one book I must read, one that I have to read without fail. And with it’s January release date looming, it seemed like the perfect time to read the book!

Heartbeat tackles quite a difficult subject, one that I would be saying was the first I’ve ever read if I hadn’t already read Priscille Sibley’s stunning debut novel The Promise of Stardust last year. Two entirely different novels, but they are centred on the same thing – a pregnant, dead woman, being kept alive for the sake of her baby, and the difficult decisions their respective families have to make in regards to the baby(s). In this case, it is 17 year old Emma who is dealing with her mother’s sudden death and her step-father Dan’s sudden interest in keeping her mother alive artificially for the sake of his unborn son. It doesn’t quite take the legal turn The Promise of Stardust did (and it didn’t blow me away as much), but it is a fascinating, thought-provoking novel. It will divide people. It divided me. Personally, I don’t know how I would face such a decision. I’m not a massive fan of kids, so I couldn’t say definitively one way or another if I would want someone to keep me alive in that situation.

I could, however, sympathise massively with Emma. Not only is she dealing with the massive loss of her mother, and the loss of interest in any sort of school work, but it was clear pretty early on that she and Dan just weren’t seeing eye to eye and this is the part that divided me. On the one hand, I saw Emma’s point. Dan had made this decision with how it best suited him, not taking into consideration Emma’s feelings on having to continually visit and see her dead mother, being kept alive for this baby. That’s a harsh thing to put on a teenager. BUT, on the other hand, I did think she was being kinda selfish. She’s continually rowing with Dan, bringing up again and again how scared her Mom was, how Dan had no clue, and I just sort of ended up feeling sorry for Dan. He had lost as well, he was just trying to make the best of a bad (awful, even) situation. He was trying to make sure that only one life died the day Emma’s mother went for some toast. It was slightly cruel of Emma to want her baby brother to die, or, rather, not to live just so her Mom could be buried normally. It was just a truly horrible situation where no one really won, and I just sort of wished Emma had been just a tad bit kinder to Dan. She wasn’t alone in her suffering, and Dan wasn’t wrong in trying to make sure his baby survived.

The novel didn’t quite blow me away, but I did thoroughly enjoy it (which seems wrong given the subject matter). I felt the novel wasn’t as dark as it could of been and it helped that Emma had Caleb and Olivia to help her through. Olivia was such an amazing friend, always being there for Emma, never letting each other down, that’s best friendship. That’s my kinda girl. Caleb was a nice distraction, I liked how he and Emma were both suffering, both punishing themselves, and how they sort of helped the other through all of their issues and all of their pain and all of their heartbreak. Because who says you can’t be happy whilst also grieving? Caleb provided a nice distraction, proved that there can be love after death, that Emma didn’t have to spend her time always being sad. I felt they complimented each other well and I felt so sad that Caleb’s parents treated him the way they did (I just wanted to shake them and tell them to grow the hell up). Heartbeat was a dividing read, one I’m still not 100% sure how I felt about it, but I feel like I mostly enjoyed it. It was touching, it was sweet and I can see why Elizabeth is such a revered writer. I do look forward to trying more of her books, and Heartbeat is a read that will leave you with a lot of questions, but also with quite the satisfying conclusion.

[Ashley]

Nose Graze — Book reviews & blogging tips

Stopped reading at about 35%

I'm completely heartbroken over here. I'm DEVASTATED that I didn't love Heartbeat. I think I'm mostly devastated because it has all the makings of a brilliant book, but the main character killed any enjoyment I could have had for it.

In a word, Emma is MEAN. She's a selfish, hostile bitch. I get that she lost her mother and that's horrible and devastating. She has every right to be upset—or even angry. But I could not handle her being mean and hateful towards her stepfather—a man who was nothing but nice, sweet, and supportive. Even when she she yells at him and basically says, "It's your fault my mother is dead!" he still hangs in there and is nice to her. He comforts her and makes her breakfast and says she's his family no matter what.. and yet she's just a raging bitch to him.

I couldn't get over how selfish and hateful Emma was. I wanted to be able to sympathize with Emma and cry with her.. but instead, her mean attitude just made me hate her. And on the one hand, I felt bad about hating a girl who just lost her incredible mother, but then she'd run off and treat Dan ( her stepfather) like complete and total shit, and I no longer felt guilty. This girl was horrible! I loved Dan; he was so nice and an EXCELLENT father figure... he didn't deserve the treatment she gave him.

I don't feel like Dan did anything wrong. She hated him for keeping his mother "alive" after she went brain dead, for the sake of saving her unborn child. Maybe I'm just ignorant or something, but I don't see anything terribly wrong with that. Emma constantly yells at him that "It's not what mother would have wanted!", but on the contrary, I think that's exactly what most mothers would want. If the mother has to die, surely most mothers would want their family to do everything they can to save their unborn child? Isn't that some kind of obvious maternal instinct ("protect the child no matter what")?

I get that it's hard to see your mother laying there in a hospital bed day after day, when she's basically already dead and there's no hope for her.. but no one's making her visit her mom every day. It's like she's only torturing herself by choosing to do that.

Emma just made out Dan to be some kind of evil, killing bastard for doing this.. and I really don't see the problem. But mostly I just didn't want to finish Heartbeat because of how much I despised Emma. She was really and truly horrible to Dan. I felt so awful for him because he was such a nice guy, and Emma was just a bitch. I just couldn't take it...

And it sucks, because I think the overall plot of this book is really interesting, and I'd have loved the chance to get more into it.. but Emma really stood in my way and ruined it for me!

[ellieroth]

I've received an ARC of this in exchange of a honest review

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