Author: Krystal Sutherland
Publisher: GP Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers
Pages: 313
Our Chemical Hearts by Krystal Sutherland is an unlikely
story of an attraction at first sight that blossoms very quickly into love.
Unlikely because Grace Town is of average height, and
average build and average attractiveness . And yet our first person narrator
Henry Isaac Page knows that she is the great love of his life.
To make things worse, she dresses up in what appear to be
hand-me-down men’s clothes, many sizes too big for her; looks unclean and
unhealthy and even stinks, and walks with a cane. Even so, in the absence of slow-mo, no breeze, no
soundtrack, and definitely no skipped heartbeats, he knows she is the one.
Despite being 17, Henry has never been touched romantically.
He has always worked hard at school to keep his grades up and to get into a
decent college. But his great ambition is to be the editor of the school
newspaper, a goal for which he has worked hard.
Henry and his friends check out Grace’s Facebook page and discover
that she was once lithe and beautiful. What could have happened just three
months ago to break her like this?
At first Henry wants Grace because he senses her brokenness. A small part of her soul was cracked. Unconsciously, he dreams of being the
one of putting her together, making her whole again. Not unlike Kintsukuroi,
the Japanese art of mending something broken by filling the cracks with gold.
But Grace is too broken for him to heal, too broken even for
KIntsukuroi, and his unyielding passion for her breaks him a little in the
process.
When the three friends, with Sadie, stalk Grace at the local
cemetery, they are shocked to see Grace in an expression of grief, sedated by
the stillness that comes with seeing an intensely private moment that doesn’t
belong to you.
Henry knows that his attraction to Grace is something bigger
than he can comprehend, but her on-off attitude worries him. When she is drunk,
Grace reciprocates Henry’s love, but denies it when she is sober. Indifferent
to him for days, she suddenly turns intimate for a while, then turns off again.
But even in the midst of the intimacy, she seems surprised to see Henry, as if
she were expecting somebody else.
And then he learns that she is hurting from the death of her
boyfriend, Dom Sawyer, in a car crash, the crash that left her with the limp.
Henry finds himself going to seed, disappointing teachers
and failing to bring out the school paper on time. Love of the kind that Grace
and Dom had feels eternal and cosmic, and when it goes out, it leaves pain
behind.
What I liked about this book was that the supporting
characters are also likeable. There is Henry’s sister Sadie, who is 12 years
older than him, and a single mother and neuroscientist. While at school, she
used to strike terror in the hearts of the teachers and students alike. I liked
the character of Sadie, a little for her rebelliousness, but even more because
she saved people’s lives and looked at her tiny son like he was made of
bright diamonds, pancakes in bed on Sunday morning, and a thunderstorm after a
seven-year drought.
Henry’s best friends are Australian émigré Murray Finch and
the partly Chinese, partly Haitian Lola Leung. The sayings that Murray comes up with are hilarious. There’s
no point pushing shit uphill with a rubber fork on a hot day.
I liked Henry because he wants to be a writer. He claims to
have a built-in radar that tells him where a comma needs to go in a
sentence.
Lola’s statement, Very few good things come out of
sentences that begin with ‘Most girls’ reminded me of the biases that spill
out through our words.
I must say that reading this book felt very disjointed because
chapter 6 was missing, and I couldn’t read the text messages and FB posts that
the characters sent to each other. That was a huge drawback, since I missed large
portions. The gaps showed as blocks of grey colour on the page. While it didn’t
affect my understanding of the plot narrative, I did lose out on the banter
between the characters.
The author uses a lot of clichés, but in a manner that calls
attention to them and makes you laugh. When Sadie, Lola, Murray and Henry are
stalking Grace by the cemetery, Lola calls it the dead center of town. When Murray
says, I hear people are dying to get in, Henry adds, I hear everyone inside
is pretty stiff.
When Grace and Henry adopt a fish for as a mascot for their
newspaper, Grace tells Henry, He has your eyes and Henry replies, He has
your fins and gills.
Murray is funny in his pretend-play of engaging sleuth
Madison Carlson for spying on his girlfriend.
So many Laugh-out-Loud moments like this.
The author also did a fine job with the pop culture
references. I couldn’t get all of them, but the ones that I did were well
executed.
The title refers to Sadie’s theory that we are all just
chemical hearts, that love is a result of chemical reactions in the brain which
either last or fizzle out. And if it gets over, we must start again because How does a novelist start a new book when the last one is finished? How does
an injured athlete start training again from the beginning?
There was another theory that I found slightly difficult to
grapple with at the beginning, but the longer I thought about it, the more
sense it made. Love doesn’t need to last a lifetime for it to be real. You can’t
judge the quality of a love by the length of time it lasts. Everything dies,
love included. Sometimes it dies with a person, sometimes it dies on its own.
I found the ending perfect. It isn’t a conventional happy
ending, but it does teach the value of detachment. I would have been
disappointed to see otherwise.
(I got an ARC from First to read.)
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