My Heart and Other Black Holes by Jasmine Warga

Other Words For Home earned multiple awards, including a John Newbery Honor, a Walter Honor for Young Readers, and a Charlotte Huck Honor. It’s a well-balanced exploration of depressed teens and what they think is worth ending their lives over, and how lives can change.Jasmine Warga is the New York Times-bestselling author of middle grade novels Other Words For Home, The Shape of Thunder, and A Rover’s Story. The book is a really interesting way of writing about depressed and suicidal teens. As Aysel and Roman learn more about each other, Aysel starts thinking about death in broader terms than just physics. When they meet, she’s surprised he’s going to kill himself, because he seems like a popular, well-liked guy.

Except she doesn’t think she can do it alone, so she goes on a website to find a nearby suicide partner named Roman. She loves physics, though, and often thinks about death in terms of physics - where will her energy go? Those aspects of the book were most interesting to me - what Aysel thought about when it came to killing herself. Her mother has a new family that Aysel doesn’t really fit into, and she doesn’t seem to have friends at school, or enjoy her job. Ultimately, she must choose between wanting to die or trying to convince Roman to live so they can discover the potential of their energy together.Īysel is depressed, mostly because of something her father did years ago, and not only how that affected Aysel’s family, but also what she thinks it means about her own future. But as their suicide pact becomes more concrete, Aysel begins to question whether she really wants to go through with it. But once she discovers a website with a section called Suicide Partners, Aysel’s convinced she’s found her solution-Roman, a teenage boy who’s haunted by a family tragedy, is looking for a partner.Įven though Aysel and Roman have nothing in common, they slowly start to fill in each other’s broken lives. There’s only one problem: she’s not sure she has the courage to do it alone. With a mother who can barely look at her without wincing, classmates who whisper behind her back, and a father whose violent crime rocked her small town, Aysel is ready to turn her potential energy into nothingness.

Sixteen-year-old physics nerd Aysel is obsessed with plotting her own death. A stunning novel about the transformative power of love, perfect for fans of 13 Reasons Why by Jay Asher.

My Heart and Other Black Holes by Jasmine Warga