In a Nutshell: Fractured families | First love | Fresh starts |
16-year-old Holly feels like an outsider, except when she’s swimming at her local pool: “Under the surface, deep in the blue-lit water, nobody can see me. There’s nobody to judge the clothes I wear, or the way my hair frizzles”. It’s at the pool she meets Ed, who’s “not like the boys at school who are either geeky or cocky and smart-arsed and think they’re all that. He’s different”. While romantic feelings, evoked in all their dizzying wonder, swell poolside, at home the seas are stormier. Struggling with depression, Holly’s mum has “become so inward-looking that she hasn’t a clue what I do with my time”. But as Holly’s home-life begins to brighten, Ed reveals that he’s grappling with a serious domestic situation of his own.
Warm-hearted, highly readable and romantic, with the bleaker elements of both teenagers’ lives handled with a sensitive lightness of touch, readers will undoubtedly root for Holly and Ed to find their happy ever after. ~ Joanne Owen
| Primary Genre | Young Adult Fiction |
| Recommendations: |
My Box-Shaped Heart is a powerful story of an unlikely friendship from Rachael Lucas, author of The State of Grace.
Holly's mum is a hoarder, and she is fed up with being picked on at school for being weird . . . and having the wrong clothes . . . and sticking out. All she wants is to be invisible. She loves swimming, because in the water everyone is the same. Ed goes to the swimming pool because everything else in his life has changed. In his old life he had money; was on the swim team; knew who he was and what he wanted. In his old life his dad hit his mum. Holly is swimming in one direction and Ed's swimming in the other. As their worlds collide they find a window into each other's lives - and learn how to meet in the middle.
My Box-Shaped Heart features in the following genres: Young Adult Fiction, Books with reviews by our Reader Review Panel, eBooks of the Month, Children’s, Teenage and Educational, Recommendations
My Box-Shaped Heart is available in Hardback, Paperback
My Box-Shaped Heart was written by Rachael Lucas and published by Feiwel and Friends
My Box-Shaped Heart has 216 pages
£16.19
