Instructions for a Secondhand Heart is a love story with a tear jerking twist: Jonny has lived for months in the hospital hooked up to machines that keep his heart beating — or, as he wryly puts it, he’s a robot with a mechanical heart. In a nearby town, twins Neve and Leo race up a dangerous boulder ostensibly to win bragging rights, but for Neve, it’s a rare opportunity to beat her seemingly perfect twin. When a tragic accident occurs, Jonny finally gets his wish to leave the hospital and return to school, and Neve has to live forever with the guilt over her role in the accident.

The story takes off when Jonny decides to learn more about the boy whose heart has given him a chance at a healthy life. He reaches out to Neve with a cover story, hiding the truth about his link to her family. Neve in turn is tired of being defined in opposition to her twin, and welcomes the chance to be with a guy who she believes knows nothing of her twin and therefore whose relationship with her is completely separate from the rest of her reality.

Instructions for a Secondhand Heart is a pretty good YA contemporary romance that may appeal to fans of The Fault in Our Stars. My main reservation with this book is that I never really felt the chemistry and attraction between Jonny and Neve. Jonny’s attraction to Neve seemed more an obsessive curiosity about Leo, and Neve’s attraction to Jonny seemed more a desire to escape talk about Leo. So when they suddenly profess to real feelings, the reveal felt insincere.

I personally thought Jonny had more of a spark with Em, his best friend from the hospital who is living with cancer and for whom Jonny sketched a superhero alterego who fights off evil blobs. Em was probably my favourite character in this book, and I thought she deserved a much better ending than she got. I thought her friendship with Jonny seemed very strong, and even if he didn’t reciprocate her feelings, he could’ve been more sensitive in how he treated her. The book also includes Jonny’s sketches of both Em’s superhero alterego and Neve, which I thought enhanced the story beautifully.

Jonny and Neve were compelling characters mostly because of their stories beyond the romance. I liked seeing Jonny readjust to life outside the hospital and try to fit in at school. I also felt for him when he tried to join activities Leo did, to somehow make himself ‘worthy’ of receiving Leo’s heart, even though Leo’s life was clearly the wrong fit for his personality. Neve in turn had a prickly, defensive posture throughout, which took her a bit longer to warm up to, but I like how Murray explores the psychological trauma Neve and her family struggle with after Leo’s death. I can sympathize with Neve wanting to stop talking about Leo all the time, and with her corresponding guilt at the desire to forget him even for a moment. These pieces seemed sincere, and the romance felt incongruous in contrast.

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Thank you to Hachette Book Group Canada for an e-galley of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I’m not sure how I feel about this book. Naomi Alderman poses the question of what would happen if girls and women suddenly became physically stronger than men, and in The Power, the ability to discharge electricity from their bodies completely overturns the gender power dynamic. Alderman’s world is pretty much the world we live in now, except with the genders reversed: men live in fear of being physically assaulted, they are objectified and when assaulted, are accused of “asking for it”, they are confronted with the glass ceiling at work and are either relegated to reporting fluff news or having their women co-workers or friends take credit for their work. In many ways, it’s a timely and thought-provoking reflection of contemporary society, and a welcome addition to conversations around women’s issues.

But at the same time, I can’t help but feel the story is too simplistic. Gender power dynamics is such a complex, nuanced subject and I feel a simple power dynamic switcheroo fails to take into account the nuance of women’s experiences and the reality of any form of lasting social change. Overturning a long-standing power structure requires an ideological shift, and the mere ability to shoot sparks from one’s hands doesn’t seem like quite enough.

The story is told from four perspectives: Allie, a survivor of parental abuse who joins a convent and becomes a Messianic figure called Mother Eve; Roxy, the leader of a British crime family; Margot, a politician rising in power whose teenage daughter Jocelyn struggles to control her own power; and Tunde, a Nigerian photojournalist and only male narrator. The rise of women into power isn’t an easy transition, and Alderman does a good job of showing the initial resistance from men, e.g. Margot’s political opponent advocating for a ‘cure’ and Margot’s cunning response to position the women’s training centres as helping women ‘control’ their powers. The stories vary in intensity and interest throughout. I personally found Roxy’s power struggles against her father and brother to be among the most compelling storylines, and I wish Margot’s story had been developed much further.

Still, I couldn’t help but wonder at how easily women all over the world accepted the consequences and benefits of their power. I see how the Catholic Church still keeps some women in the Philippines hesitant to use birth control. I see how women living in abusive situations struggle to leave it behind, even with seemingly strong external support systems. I see how atrocities of the recent past (e.g. Martial Law in the Philippines, slavery in North America) are still glossed over and its effects ignored by some people. And all I can think of is, will superpowers actually make such a difference? Where are the women who are afraid to use their power, who possibly resist using their power for whatever reason? There are some token pieces of resistance in the earlier part of the book, but overall, it seems like most if not all the women in the world Alderman creates are either radical revolutionaries or more measured revolutionaries, with not much room for other forms of responses.

I wondered if there were women made a conscious decision not to use their powers at all or who set up shelters for men to deal with the psychological impact of the social shift. I wondered about trans women, intersex persons and gender-fluid persons, and if and how the power affected them. I wondered as well about scientists and military strategists of all genders, who somehow couldn’t find a defence against electric jolts other than baseball bats and guns. It’s possible all these were mentioned in the book in passing, but I wish the stories given prominence had a bit more variety in their responses.

That being said, there’s a welcome catharsis in the book’s form of revolution. I especially love that the power is passed on from one girl or woman to another, and than it’s the touch of another girl or woman that activates the power in you. It’s a wonderful metaphor of women’s solidarity being the force than brings about this social change. There’s also an especially powerful scene where a young girl delivering food passes on the power to a woman being held captive for sex, and this woman in turn passes it on to the other women held captive with her until they all as a group turn on their captors and become free. I also like the irony in the frame narrative of a male writer compiling the historical research for his female supervisor who then critiques as unrealistic his theory that at one point in history, men actually held more power in society than women did.

So there’s a lot to like in this book, and the concept it explores is interesting. The story itself dragged a bit at times, and I wish there had been more nuance in the stories being told, but otherwise, The Power is a very timely book and I can see why it won the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction.

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Thank you to Hachette Book Group Canada for an e-gallery in exchange for an honest review.

The Music Shop has Rachel Joyce’s signature charm: Frank, a “gentle bear of a man,” owns a music shop on a street of independent shops trying to stay in business against developers who want to buy them out. The year is 1988 and CDs are coming into fashion, yet Frank steadfastly refuses to sell anything but vinyl. Vinyl, Frank argues, is far superior to the “clean” sounds CDs make:

What’s music got to do with clean? Where is the humanity in clean? Life has surface noise! Do you want to listen to furniture polish? … We are human beings. We need lovely things we can see and hold. Yes, vinyl can be a pain. It’s not convenient. It gets scratched. But that’s the point. We are acknowledging the importance of music and beauty in our lives. You don’t get that if you’re not prepared to make AN EFFORT. [p. 53]

Moreover, Frank has a special talent: he has a knack for finding the specific piece of music each customer needs, even if it’s not the music they want. In an early chapter, a customer enters his shop saying he loves only Chopin; Frank looks deep into his eyes, notices heartbreak, and prescribes Aretha Franklin. While initially dubious, the customer ends up leaving with tears in his eyes and an Aretha record clutched to his chest. He’s basically the fantasy shopkeeper for anyone who loves supporting independent businesses, and I love that he’s based on a real person — in her foreword, Rachel Joyce says the book was partially inspired by an encounter her husband had at a music shop, where the shopkeeper recommended the perfect record to help cure his insomnia.

Frank’s world gets jolted when a beautiful German woman with gloved hands and a pea green coat faints in front of his shop. Ilse Brauchmann catches Frank’s eye not just because of her beauty, but also because when he looks at her, he hears only silence. She confesses she doesn’t really like music, and hires him to give her music classes — essentially teach her his love for music. Both have more in their pasts than they let on, and deep-seated wounds that need to heal.

Fans of Rachel Joyce’s Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy will find the same whimsical charm and idyllic world building in Music Shop. From the earliest chapters, we can pretty much guess where this story is going, and happily settle in for a lovely ride. Music lovers, and particularly fans of classical music, will absolutely find a kindred spirit in Frank’s love for the genre and his unerring belief in its power. Music Shop is a book for believers; Frank and Ilse’s story invites us to suspend cynicism and believe in the power of music with them. The story is set in 1988 London, but Joyce’s language gives it a timeless, anyplace feel, such that it’s the development that shuts down the shops on Frank’s street and the CDs that edge out Frank’s sales that feel anachronistic, even though our logical minds tell us otherwise.

Unfortunately, Joyce goes a bit too far later in the book, where the story picks up after a 20-year hiatus from the characters. Suddenly, the charm no longer feels easy, and what we learn about Frank veers dangerously close to melodrama. The climactic scene at a mall food court was the final straw for me — it was cheesy and schmaltzy, and I say this as a full-on fan of Hallmark holiday movies and Nicholas Sparks tear jerkers. I won’t give any spoilers about what actually happens, and part of me wonders if the scene played out on-screen may bring me to tears, but on the page, it just made me cringe. Far from the easy charm and rousing emotion of most of the story until then, this scene played false, a resolution that should’ve fit but instead felt unearned. I almost wanted the story to have ended 20 years ago.

The final chapter returns to the whimsy of the beginning, and eases us back into the world Joyce had painstakingly created. I only wish the section before hadn’t been so discordant.

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Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.