[Review] A Hole in My Heart by Rie Charles

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Title: A Hole in My Heart

Author: Rie Charles (Website)

Publisher: Dundurn

Genre: Middle Grades - Contemporary Fiction

Release Date: September 1, 2014 

Format: eARC provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review

Synopsis via Goodreads:

After losing her mother to illness and her father to his work, Nora Mackenzie must leave her home in the interior of B.C. for a North Vancouver school. Estranged from her classmates, her family, and the life she's lost, Nora walls herself off from the people around her. At the same time, her young cousin, Lizzie, is facing an uncertain future as one of the first children to undergo open-heart surgery. As the operation approaches, Nora discovers that she is not the only person in her family isolated by fear and grief.

This was not an easy read for me. I found myself wanting to speed up just to get through the pages and see what the point was. Personally, I did not connect with the characters even though I did feel that the overall message was 1) an important one for the reading age group and 2) the message was displayed in more than one scenario. 

Through Nora we're able to meet a variety of characters who are each coping or working through their grief. I did appreciate this approach because I feel like sometimes, especially as tweens/teens, we feel alone in processing pain and that others would not understand. What we learn is that while it may come in many forms the idea of pain/grief is universal and we all handle it differently. 

I do wish more emotion and character development would've taken place. There were points in the story where I was like, "who's that?" because I had forgotten the character's introduction, it was brief and unfocused, and subsequently their tie-in to the overall story line. For dealing with such heavy topics I was not feeling the feels.

2 Stars: I would recommend this for 10-12 year old readers who are dealing
with any type of pain, loneliness,  and/or grief.