My Beating Teenage Heart

Amazon Best Books of the Month, October 2011: Ashlyn Baptise doesn’t know where she is. Now somehow without a body she still exists in consciousness, and she finds herself drawn to a stranger. Brecken Cody is out of sorts, too. Having recently lost his sister, for which he feels partly to blame, Brecken is in the throes of grief. It is hard to talk about this novel without giving away a pivotal plot point but that the way in which Martin reveals how Brecken and Ashlyn are intertwined was unexpected—and amazing. Voice really drives the novel, making it impossible not to root for both characters as they try to navigate new emotional (and in Ashlyn’s case, physical, too) experiences. In the vein Gayle Forman’s If I Stay and Jenny Downham’s Before I Die, My Beating Teenage Heart is the type of novel that will remain with you long after you’ve read the last page. --Jessica Schein