The Half-Life of Love
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
"In The Half-Life of Love, Brianna Bourne offers us a moving and enthralling story that reminds us that love lights our way as we all travel in death’s shadow." --Jeff Zentner, award-winning author of In the Wild Light and The Serpent King
Flint Larsen has 41 days, 9 hours, and 42 minutes to live. He’s known exactly when he’s going to die since he was eight years old and half-lifed, a small twinge that tells a person when they’ve lived half their life. From that moment, Flint’s done everything he can to make his death more bearable. Cutting off all his friends, refusing to eat his favorite foods, reading only the most depressing literature by long-dead writers. He plans to spend his final days back in his hometown with his parents, quietly waiting to die.
But then he meets September Harrington, an utter explosion of brilliance and fun, and all his plans fly out the window. September has dedicated herself to curing the half-life, landing a coveted internship at the world-renowned Half-Life Institute. She has her own past that she’s refusing to deal with, choosing instead to spend her nights living it up with her friends and her days deep in the lab, where she’s working to find a cure.
When their worlds collide, it feels like the start of an epic, once-in-a-lifetime love. Only Flint can’t bring himself to tell September he’s dying, and September’s keeping secrets too. The closer they get, the less time they have together and the more their secrets threaten to destroy everything. Can September and Flint save each other, or are their days numbered from the start?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Due to an early onset of the scientific phenomenon called the twinge—during which individuals experience a seizure when they're exactly halfway throughout their lifespan—morose 16-year-old Flint Larsen has always known when he was going to die. After his parents spend their life savings trying to make the most of the short time he has left, Flint decides he wants to spend his final 41 days, nine hours, and 42 minutes in Carbon Junction, "the one place I knew wouldn't leave my parents in debt." His plan to quietly wait out his death is derailed, however, when he meets September Harrington, an irrepressibly cheerful teenage scientist whose goal is to cure the twinge. Flint declines to divulge that his life cycle is coming to an end, and as the two spend more time together, he finds himself enjoying his existence for the first time since he was eight years old. The narrative alternates between the pair's perspectives, rendered in distinct, fluid-feeling prose by Bourne (You & Me at the End of the World), occasionally diverting attention away from Flint's ever-present ticking clock and lowering the book's sense of urgency. The novel's assured emphasis on the difference between living and surviving presents a hopeful read. Characters cue as white. Ages 14–up.
