In this lovely and passionate story, told in the first-person present, the questions of love are repeated over, under, around, and beneath: how do parents love their children? How do friends care for one another? What do love and sex have to do with each other? Ellen is 14, and the two most important people in her life are her older brother Link, a high-school senior, and his best friend James. In a world of privilege, private schools, Manhattan locales, and summers in Maine, Ellen wrestles with her deep love for her brother and the intensity of her feelings for his best friend. Are James and Link a couple? Ellen wrestles with that, too, with what it might mean to be gay. When Link begins dating a girl, James and Ellen try to find what they are to each other without Link, Ellen sees her brother's talents, her parents' differing desires but very real concerns, and James's complex emotional life as puzzles to be solved with intensity and with desire. "A mind with its own heartbeat" is the favorite phrase of Link and Ellen's dad, and Ellen's mind beats across the tangle of feelings of all these beguiling, intelligent, and complicated folk. Breathtaking in the purity of its emotions and in its refusal to pigeonhole any of its characters, it will engage teen readers to the very last page.
Ellen loves Link and James. Her older brother and his best friend are the only company she ever wants. She knows they fight, but she makes it a policy never to take sides. She loves her brother, the math genius and track star. She is totally, madly in love with James, his face full of long eyelashes and hidden smiles. “When you grow out of it,” James teases her, “you will break my heart.”
Ellen knows she'll never outgrow it. She'll always love James just the way she'll always love Link. Then someone at school asks if Link and James might be in love with each other. A simple question.
Link refuses to discuss it. James refuses to stay friends with a boy so full of secrets. Ellen's parents want Link to keep his secrets to himself, but Ellen wants to know who her brother really is. When is curiosity a betrayal? And if James says he loves her, isn't that just another way of saying he still loves Link?
My Heartbeat is a fast, furious story in which a quirky triangle learns to change its shape and Ellen, at least, learns the limits of what you can ever know about whom you love.
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Ellen knows she'll never outgrow it. She'll always love James just the way she'll always love Link. Then someone at school asks if Link and James might be in love with each other. A simple question.
Link refuses to discuss it. James refuses to stay friends with a boy so full of secrets. Ellen's parents want Link to keep his secrets to himself, but Ellen wants to know who her brother really is. When is curiosity a betrayal? And if James says he loves her, isn't that just another way of saying he still loves Link?
My Heartbeat is a fast, furious story in which a quirky triangle learns to change its shape and Ellen, at least, learns the limits of what you can ever know about whom you love.
My Heartbeat
Ellen loves Link and James. Her older brother and his best friend are the only company she ever wants. She knows they fight, but she makes it a policy never to take sides. She loves her brother, the math genius and track star. She is totally, madly in love with James, his face full of long eyelashes and hidden smiles. “When you grow out of it,” James teases her, “you will break my heart.”
Ellen knows she'll never outgrow it. She'll always love James just the way she'll always love Link. Then someone at school asks if Link and James might be in love with each other. A simple question.
Link refuses to discuss it. James refuses to stay friends with a boy so full of secrets. Ellen's parents want Link to keep his secrets to himself, but Ellen wants to know who her brother really is. When is curiosity a betrayal? And if James says he loves her, isn't that just another way of saying he still loves Link?
My Heartbeat is a fast, furious story in which a quirky triangle learns to change its shape and Ellen, at least, learns the limits of what you can ever know about whom you love.
Ellen knows she'll never outgrow it. She'll always love James just the way she'll always love Link. Then someone at school asks if Link and James might be in love with each other. A simple question.
Link refuses to discuss it. James refuses to stay friends with a boy so full of secrets. Ellen's parents want Link to keep his secrets to himself, but Ellen wants to know who her brother really is. When is curiosity a betrayal? And if James says he loves her, isn't that just another way of saying he still loves Link?
My Heartbeat is a fast, furious story in which a quirky triangle learns to change its shape and Ellen, at least, learns the limits of what you can ever know about whom you love.
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Editorial Reviews
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940169379839 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
| Publication date: | 01/28/2003 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
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