TLC Book Tours: The Tell-Tale Heart by Jill Dawson

Title: The Tell-Tale Heart
Author: Jill Dawson
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Publish Date: February 10, 2015
Source: TLC Book Tours

What's the Story?:

From Goodreads.com: "After years of excessive drink and sex, Patrick has suffered a massive heart attack. Although he's only fifty, he's got just months to live. But a tragic accident involving a teenager and a motorcycle gives the university professor a second chance. He receives the boy's heart in a transplant, and by this miracle of science, two strangers are forever linked.

Though Patrick's body accepts his new heart, his old life seems to reject him. Bored by the things that once enticed him, he begins to look for meaning in his experience. Discovering that his donor was a local boy named Drew Beamish, he becomes intensely curious about Drew's life and the influences that shaped him--from the eighteenth-century ancestor involved in a labor riot to the bleak beauty of the Cambridgeshire countryside in which he was raised. Patrick longs to know the story of this heart that is now his own.

In this intriguing and deeply absorbing story, Jill Dawson weaves together the lives and loves of three vibrant characters connected by fate to explore questions of life after death, the nature of the soul, the unseen forces that connect us, and the symbolic power of the heart."

My Two Cents:

In "The Tell-Tale Heart," Patrick gets a new lease on life after he has a heart transplant. Patrick is a professor who has spent his life passionately studying and perhaps neglecting his personal life. His family life isn't great and being able to essentially get another chance has really made him think about previous choices and whether or not they were the right ones. This book also explores whether or not the heart has some sort of internal memory. Not only is Patrick the focus of this story but Drew, the teenaged donor, and one of his ancestors become a part of the story as well.

This story felt very experimental in a lot of ways. The connections between the three main characters are tenuous and we do not really get to see the overall connection between all three of the characters until the very end of the book. I wish that we would have been able to see a little bit more of a connection sooner as I think it would have helped me to connect with both the stories and the characters a little quicker. While Patrick's story is interspersed throughout the book, Willie and Drew's stories are packed into one section for each character pretty much. All three of these characters are very different but they are connected to some degree in the way that they see the world, which is sort of cool.

I did really enjoy the writing in this book. There are some really interesting and good bits of writing in this book that kept me reading. Overall, I liked the writing and would try another book by this author but I would have liked more of a connection to the story.  

Follow the Rest of the Tour:


Tuesday, February 10th: A Bookish Affair
Wednesday, February 11th: JulzReads
Thursday, February 12th: Mom in Love With Fiction
Monday, February 16th: Books and Bindings
Monday, February 16th: Sharon’s Garden of Book Reviews
Tuesday, February 17th: As I turn the page
Wednesday, February 18th: Cold Read
Thursday, February 19th: Ageless Pages Reviews
Thursday, February 19th: Sidewalk Shoes
Monday, February 23rd: Vivacious Hobo
Tuesday, February 24th: Every Free Change Book Reviews
Wednesday, February 25th: Why Girls Are Weird
Thursday, February 26th: A Patchwork of Books
Friday, February 27th: Much Madness is Divinest Sense