Heartbeat is written as a poem, but it doesn’t rhyme. It is a story and reads like a story, but I think the fact that it is written as a poem guides the reader to follow the story and not be distracted by too many words. It is in the first person, as most Young Adult novels seem to be, and the girl telling the story likes to run, but she is not competitive. She does not understand why people race to win, because she likes to run by herself or with one friend, and she runs barefoot just because she likes to run.Throughout the story she is learning about life and thinking about what she likes to do, and besides running she loves to draw. In the story she is having a hard time seeing her grandfather forgetting things, but this is balanced by the joy of her mother having a baby. This is a peaceful story that is enjoyable to read.
I enjoyed the parts about what she was learning from her teacher about footnotes, “forbidden words,” and using the thesaurus. For a book written as a poem with no real sentence structure, there was a lot about grammar in it!
Review by David Dunkerton
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