How to Save a Life
A Novel
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4.2 • 20 Ratings
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
In this moving love story, three friends find out what it really means to save someone.
“A heart-stopping, heart-wrenching, and heartwarming story that kept me reading well into the night.”—Clare Pooley, New York Times bestselling author of The Authenticity Project
Kerry Smith is going to save lives—and so is her best friend, Tim Palmer. After years of working toward medical school, they are about to take their entrance exams. But on the eve of the new millennium, a classmate goes into cardiac arrest, changing everything.
For nearly eighteen minutes, rising soccer star Joel Greenaway is dead. For nearly eighteen minutes, Kerry performs CPR on her longtime crush. And for nearly eighteen minutes, Tim is too shocked to help. Though they don’t yet know it, those eighteen minutes will change the next eighteen years of their lives.
Because, as it turns out, saving a life doesn’t always guarantee a happy ending.
With his soccer career cut short, Joel lashes out and breaks Kerry’s heart by ending their burgeoning relationship with a cruelty that derails her future, while Tim struggles to reconcile his dream of becoming a doctor with the reality of failing to act. As each struggles to move on from the events of that fateful New Year’s Eve, their lives can’t seem to stop colliding year after year. Ensnared by their shared histories and her big heart, Kerry soon finds herself picking up the pieces after both broken men. But when Kerry is the one who needs saving, will anyone be there for her?
As Kerry, Tim, and Joel discover what it means to love, to forgive, and to find your calling, How to Save a Life shows us that there is more than one way to save a life—and more than one path to finding meaning in your own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Carter (a pseudonym for English author Kate Harrison) serves up a heartfelt if uneven love story that turns on a love triangle and a health crisis. On New Year's Eve in 1999, a group of Brighton, England, high school classmates gather to celebrate. Golden boy Joel, already on track for a career in the Premier League, collapses during a pickup game. Kerry (who harbors a secret crush on Joel) and Tim (who has a secret crush on Kerry) both hope to become doctors, and have already undergone first response training. But while Kerry remains coolheaded and successfully performs CPR, Tim is paralyzed by inaction—only to accept most of the credit after Joel survives. Joel, who suffers from a previously unknown heart ailment, grows bitter when he learns his soccer aspirations are over for good. Kerry and Tim, too, are shaped both personally and professionally by how each chose to respond in Joel's moment of crisis. This dynamic continues to play out over the course of the next 18 years, as romantic relationships are complicated by addiction, infidelity, and jealousy, and one leg of the love triangle eventually falls off. While the novel's earlier portions plod along and its last quarter feels hurried, Carter delivers plenty of drama. Readers will champion these characters' efforts to find themselves.
