Meet Me When My Heart Stops by Becky Hunt

 Engaging/Gripping/Emotional

Genres: Contemporary Fiction/Family Drama/Romance/Fantasy

Meet Me When My Heart Stops by Becky Hunt

After an incident in her garden at the age of five, Emery Wilson is diagnosed with a very rare medical condition. As she grows older, she resents it preventing her from engaging in activities with her peers and friends. Her family are so over-the-top protective. She can see the fear in their eyes and grows tired of the daily monitoring of her well-being, a contributory factor to her mindset later in life of not wanting to put down roots, settle down with someone, therefore giving them the burden of feeling responsible for her, and see 'that look' constantly, on the faces of people she loves. However, during that first episode in her garden when she was little, she had, in another world, where she recognised her surroundings but knew it wasn't real, met a man who had told her that his purpose was to prepare people for what followed. Each time though, she had been sent back. As the years pass and she continues to experience these episodes, she discovers more about this person who is very real to her, and with every visit, their bond grows. How is she supposed to manage her feelings for someone who is unobtainable, alongside her real life? Plus, what will she discover when she delves deeper into his previous mortal existence?

Having more than a passing interest with all things 'afterlife' related, this title intrigued me. I have read quite a few books that maintain the theory that this Author appears to subscribe to, that there is an 'in between world' that we go to before we pass over to whatever lies beyond.

The narrative of this book is an extremely clever one, inasmuch as the idea of a person being able to frequent both worlds due to the sporadic nature of their condition. I liked the friendship and the bond that developed between Emery and her spirit guide, and the changing environments that they were able to inhabit dependant on moods and thoughts. I could also really understand Emery's struggles with not feeling that she was able to commit to a fuller life on earth as she perhaps would have done in a healthier body and, for a time, her preference to be in the other place where her health did not define her.

The storyline involving the other characters kept me reading and engaged, and the devastating occurrence involving someone close to Emery was in the end, a real shock that I was hoping wouldn't be the way that the Author chose to deal with it. There aren't any, if any humorous moments as I recall, but I guess that is the nature of the narrative.

The back story of Emery's spirit guide slotted in very well, but I had guessed it well before the eventual outcome was revealed. Emery's curiosity and wanting to find out more about him and the person he was with at the time of his death, enlisting the assistance of a long term childhood friend who made his living as a Journalist, was both Intriguing and well-constructed.

My only criticisms of this thought provoking novel were that I feel that it would have been logical to have matched Lisa's situation to Nick's, making his theory correct, that her entrapment was indeed a parallel of his. I struggled with the idea that someone can be clinically dead for minutes at a time and not require medical attention. The idea that she could just get up (albeit something that got harder with age) and just walk away, just wasn't realistic to me given that Emery was a real human being and how she says she says she feels when she comes round. I was disappointed with the way that the chapters skipped month, if not years of her life at a time, with the last chapter skipping forward forty years of her life. Although I acknowledge that this would have been to enable the Author to cover a greater expanse of Emery's lifetime. Lastly, the ending, I thought I had predicted it and think that my version would have been better. As much as I would like to, I won't give it away, except to say that I didn't feel that the conclusion made what Emery went through worthwhile, after all her inner turmoil and conflicts with others due to her diagnosis.

I would certainly recommend this book, but really feel that it needs some sort of sequel.

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