"Does A Heart Have Memory?"
Reviewed by Susan Dyer
Posted July 20, 2015
Fiction Family Life
Patrick Robson is an alcoholic and he loves the ladies.
He suffers a heart
attack and even though he is only fifty years old, his
heart is shot and he
only has months to live! THE TELL TALE HEART follows
Patrick after he
has a heart transplant.
He receives the heart of a young boy that was in a
tragic motorcycle accident. Patrick feels as if he has
been given a second
chance and tries to change his vulgar ways. Patrick does
try to change his life a bit after his operation. When he
learns of the donor's identity, he
doesn't try to weasel his way into Drew's family or
anything like that, but he
does appreciate the bonds that have tied him to the young
man's life.
Patrick now has emotions that he has never truly felt
before his heart
transplant. Does the heart actually remember the way the
donor felt? Or is it
just Patrick with a new lease on life? Now he has feelings
of compassion,
love, and basic understanding. Will he dismiss these new
found feelings or
go back to his contemptuous, hard former self?
Read THE TELL-TALE
HEART to see what he does and if he changes. You will be
instantly
caught up in Patrick's life and the people surrounding
him. Not to mention
the interesting side thread of the story of Drew Beamish,
the young boy
whose tragic accident gives Patrick his new heart. Jill
Dawson introduces
his 18th century ancestors as well and how they influenced
the young Drew
Beamish today.
I found THE TELL-TALE HEART to be an original and nicely
written story
but a bit slow in the beginning. I became more interested
in the story and
characters as I got further along in the book. After
reading this book it
really helped me to realize that no one is perfect. Just
when you
thought that there might be a so called "perfect" person
you realize there is
no such thing. Everyone makes mistakes and its something
that you learn
from, but how you handle the situation and what you become
afterwards is
what's going to help you as a person in the end. I love
the way Jill Dawson
interweaves the two stories of Drew and Patrick along with
Drew's relative,
Willie Beamiss. I would recommend THE TELL-TALE HEART to
anyone interested in a
heartfelt and thought provoking story.
SUMMARY
A man’s life and his capacity for love mysteriously
changes
after a heart transplant in this
dramatic and affecting novel—as provocative and poignant
as
the works of Jodi Picoult, Jojo Moyes,
and Alice Sebold—from the acclaimed Orange Prize nominee
and
author of Lucky Bunny. After years of excessive drink and sex, Patrick’s heart
has
collapsed. Only fifty, he has been given
six months to live. But a tragic accident involving a
teenager and a motorcycle gives the university
professor a second chance. He receives the boy’s heart in
a
transplant, and by this miracle of
science, two strangers are forever linked. Though Patrick’s body accepts his new heart, his old life
seems to reject him. Bored by the things
that once enticed him, he begins to look for meaning in
his
experience. Discovering that his donor
was a local boy named Drew Beamish, he becomes intensely
curious about Drew’s life and the
influences that shaped him-from the eighteenth-century
ancestor involved in a labor riot to the
bleak beauty of the Cambridgeshire countryside in which he
was raised. Patrick longs to know the
story of this heart that is now his own. In this intriguing and deeply absorbing story, Jill Dawson
weaves together the lives and loves of
three vibrant characters connected by fate to explore
questions of life after death, the nature of
the soul, the unseen forces that connect us, and the
symbolic power of the heart.
What do you think about this review?
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