The further I get into my reviews for the year, the more I realize just how much YA I read! This is another example of just how very grown up YA can be. When I was an actual young adult, I was reading Stephen King and Dean Koontz and Robin Cooke. Now that I’m an adult adult, I wonder if YA was this good in the 90s. If not, well…you youths better be grateful.
“Anyone who has actually been that sad can tell you that there’s nothing beautiful or literary or mysterious about depression.”
My Heart and Other Black Holes is about a 16 year old girl named Aysel who has decided to kill herself. But she’s not sure she can make herself go through with it, so she seeks out a partner online who wants to do the same. He’s an accountability partner — like getting a gym buddy. But for suicide. Yeah. It’s a heavy book.
“Depression is like a heaviness that you can’t ever escape. It crushes down on you, making even the smallest things like tying your shoes or chewing on toast seem like a twenty-mile hike uphill. Depression is a part of you; it’s in your bones and your blood.”
You can probably guess that as Asyel gets close to this boy and has a change of heart. But this book is so much more than that. Y’all, it is HARD to be in the head of a teenager who wants to die. As a person who has felt that way before (although luckily I was older and had a HUGE support system), I had a tough time with this book. I kept wanting it to get happy! Life-affirming! But the author does not shy away from the feelings of her characters, and I’m so impressed by that.