Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Released: March 22th, 2010
Genre: YA contemp
Review copy from publisher
Georgia knows what it means to keep secrets. She knows how to ignore things. She knows that some things are better left unsaid. . . . Or are they?
When Georgia and her best friend, Riley, travel along with nine other suburban Pennsylvania kids to Anapra, a squatters’ village in the heat-flattened border city of Juarez, Mexico, secrets seem to percolate and threaten both a friendship and a life. Certainties unravel. Reality changes. And Georgia is left to figure out who she is outside the world she’s always known.
From HarperCollins Canada website.
It’s weird. The first time I picked up The Heart is Not a Size, I only got a few pages in before I set it down. People had gushed about it, but I wasn’t feeling it. But it was for review and I always try to read review books (in a timely manner, when I can). So after letting it sit on my shelves for over a year, I decided to give it another try. And read it in one night. I dunno, I must have been in a mood the first time I tried.
I’m not a very visual person. When I read a book, I don’t often picture it in my head. Strange, but true. But sometimes when I read a book, I can imagine it as a movie, almost scene by scene. And that’s what this book was like for me. I could picture it as the type of coming of age movie that I would watch over and over again.
This is a story about friendship and how we sometimes struggle to do the right thing for a friend and it ends up blowing up in our faces. I loved that the book centered on Georgia and Riley’s friendship. That it wasn’t all about the boys and the romance. Sure, there may have been hints of romance, but it wasn’t a completely integral part of the story. It wasn’t the point of the book.
I think female readers in particular will be able to identify with The Heart is Not a Size. I am a fair distance from the age of Georgia and Riley but their friendship and story had me thinking of some of the friendships I had when I was a teen and how important they are to who I am now.
So I’m definitely glad I gave it another go. And I’m happy that the lovely peeps at HarperCollins Canada sent along a review copy.
