A Darkly Beating Heart
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A troubled girl confronts her personal demons in this time-travel thriller alternating between present day and 19th century Japan.
No one knows how to handle Reiko. She is full of hatred; all she can think about is how to best hurt herself and those people closest to her. After a failed suicide attempt at her home in Seattle, Reiko's parents send her to spend the summer with family in Japan, hoping she will learn to control her emotions. But while visiting Kuramagi, a historic village preserved to reflect the nineteenth-century Edo period, Reiko finds herself slipping backward in time into the nineteenth-century life of Miyu, a young woman even more vengeful than Reiko herself. Reiko loves escaping into Miyu's life . . . until she discovers Kuramagi's dark secret and must face down Miyu's demons as well as her own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Seattle teen Reiko is "mastering a path of hatred" in order to exact revenge for the betrayal, abuse, and humiliation she has suffered at the hands of those closest to her. She travels to Japan before college to live with her uncle's family in Tokyo, where she finds another target: her self-absorbed, fame-seeking cousin, Akiko. While unhappily photographing Akiko during a shoot in a small town, Reiko finds a stone that transports her from present-day Japan into the life of an Edo-period girl named Miyu. Though Reiko loves escaping into Miyu's world at first, she eventually uncovers and must foil Miyu's own plan for vengeance. Smith's (Dreamstrider) detailed descriptions of Japanese culture and the time travel element are the highlights of this novel. Reiko and Miyu come across as angry caricatures; Smith slowly and cryptically teases out their traumatic pasts, making it difficult to empathize with either of them. Beyond the "why," Smith also does little to elaborate on the "how" of Reiko's plot, and the conclusion is too neatly and unrealistically resolved given Reiko's previous mental state. Ages 12 up.
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