Published on September 18th, 2018 by Simon Pulse
Genre: Contemporary
Format: eARC
Source: Publisher
Pages: 368
Goodreads
🌟🌟🌟.5
When everything has been taken from you, what else is there to do but run?
So that’s what Annabelle does—she runs from Seattle to Washington, DC, through mountain passes and suburban landscapes, from long lonely roads to college towns. She’s not ready to think about the why yet, just the how—muscles burning, heart pumping, feet pounding the earth. But no matter how hard she tries, she can’t outrun the tragedy from the past year, or the person—The Taker—that haunts her.
Followed by Grandpa Ed in his RV and backed by her brother and two friends (her self-appointed publicity team), Annabelle becomes a reluctant activist as people connect her journey to the trauma from her past. Her cross-country run gains media attention and she is cheered on as she crosses state borders, and is even thrown a block party and given gifts. The support would be nice, if Annabelle could escape the guilt and the shame from what happened back home. They say it isn’t her fault, but she can’t feel the truth of that.
Through welcome and unwelcome distractions, she just keeps running, to the destination that awaits her. There, she’ll finally face what lies behind her—the miles and love and loss…and what is to come.
Before we get into the review, I wrote a little bit on Goodreads about the content warnings for this book. There is gun violence in this story. If you want to know the details to see if this is the right book for you, see my review.
Okay, looking at the rating alone, it's clear I didn't outright love this book. But A Heart in the Body of the World tackles a few issues I haven't actually seen very much in fiction, and it does it so well, that I can't discount it. I want to talk about the things it does well first before we get into why it didn't work for me, specifically. Because I do think this is a good book and I do think there are the right readers for this.
There are quite a lot of books about the sexual violence girls face in this society. This is not quite that book--there is no sexual violence, no rape, no assault, nothing quite like that. But this story does look at the subtler side of that coin. The way girls are told to suck it up, to smile, to be nice, to give him a chance. We're told to shut up and be polite and "take it as a compliment." We're constantly being held accountable for the actions of the boys and men in our lives. We are constantly trying to manage and mitigate their feelings. This is not our fucking job but somehow our society has saddled us with this burden. And A Heart in the Body of the World is really, really fed up with this dynamic and takes it to task, and it's GREAT.
The Taker, the shooter, the one who is actually responsible for the violence mentioned earlier, haunts Annabelle. She is running across the country, hundreds of miles away from him, and he is there. She sees him around trail beds, in wheat fields, lurking in hollows and shadows. She can't escape him now, after, much the way she couldn't escape him then. See, in the months leading up to the shooting, The Taker was persistent. He flirted, he found a way into her circle of friends. He texted he called, he set up dates that Annabelle didn't really want to go on. But she had been taught her whole life to be polite, to be nice, to not hurt anyone, so she never spoke up, she never told him no. And this attitude, these rules, are so pervasive. How many of us have been stuck in an uncomfortable situation where the other party didn't necessarily do anything maliciously wrong, so we just took it, even if our alarm bells were ringing? How many of us spoke up in those situations only to be told later on that we should have been nicer, that we should have given him the chance?
I know there must be other books that have tackled this slimy, subtler underside of misogyny and violence against women, but I can't think of any right now.
A few other pluses: the relationship between Annabelle and her grandfather; the romance; the way Annabelle's friends love and support her and rally around her; the inclusion of social media.
While the message and the meaning behind this book were great, it's also still a book, arguably designed for pleasure and entertainment. And I didn't get that from this for the most part. The writing style was not for me (third-person present tense) even if it was the catalyst to get me out of a reading slump. It is fast-paced for sure, but sentences like "Annabelle has to get out of here," or "Annabelle is hungry" just don't do it for me. I kind of understand writing it this way, to be very present and urgent and right in the story. But again, personal preference.
I was completely lacking in emotional connection. I couldn't relate to Annabelle at all; in fact, I feel like I barely know her even after spending a whole book and 2,700 miles with her. I get that she feels like she completely lost herself after the tragedy, but there were two timelines going on and I didn't even connect with her in the past. Outside of the universal stuff I talked about earlier.
This emotional disconnect made it hard for me to feel much when we got to the actual tragedy. I obviously felt the surface-level horror of what was happening to these kids, and I felt the rage about our gun laws here in the United States. I felt the anger present in Annabelle's mission. But I didn't feel grief or despair for the characters themselves. This should have been a heavy and intense moment, but it wasn't for me. And it actually felt kind of... wrong. We have to wait until very, very near the end of the book to find out exactly what The Taker has done. I understand the need for tension and to keep the reader turning the pages. But this felt almost like using the event as a plot twist, a big reveal. The fact is that people, KIDS, are going through this sort of thing daily here, and for some reason using this event in this particular manner did not sit well with me.
All that being said, I still think A Heart in the Body of the World is a good, important, and timely book. It's one with a very relevant message, a loud and urgent voice speaking out about what kids today are dealing with--AND SHOULD NOT BE DEALING WITH. I think it tackles the challenges almost all girls face and does so very, very well. If I could have connected with the characters more, I think it would have easily been a five-star read for me, and I really hope it IS that five-star experience for others.
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