In a Heartbeat (review)

A heartbeat is literally what Eagan and Amelia have in common—after Eagan, a promising young ice skater, dies from a fall in competition, Amelia receives her heart as a replacement for her own damaged one. The girls take turns narrating, with Eagan looking at her life in retrospect from a strange post-mortem limbo, and Amelia coming to grips with both her newly healthy body and the influences she feels she's receiving from her heart's donor. The flavor is more mystically touched reality than outright supernatural, with the cellular-memory idea and Eagan's afterlife viewpoint operating as ways to access a complicated and emotional life transition rather than the main points of the story. Intriguingly, Eagan, with her sharply challenging approach to life and her strained relationship with her difficult mother, remains the strongest character even after her death; Amelia's health limitations believably leave her little room for personality outside of her situation, and her growing display of characteristics associated with Eagan could also be the mark of a young teenager who finally has the energy to behave according to her age. Readers will therefore find plenty of fodder for thought and argument about the existence of the phenomenon, but even those in it for the emotional drama will be moved by the story of two girls whose lives overlap in tragedy and salvation. Ellsworth includes a brief, non-skeptical note about the notion of cellular memory.