Heart-Shaped Bruise - Tanya Byrne

Heart-Shaped Bruise is the debut novel from Tanya Byrne. It was published in 2012 by Headline Publishing Group. It was shortlisted for the CWA New Blood Dagger award in 2012, an award given to a debut author's first book in memory of John Creasey, CWA's founder.

Heart-shaped Bruise tells the story of Emily Koll, the most notorious inmate of Archway Young Offenders Institution. The novel is written in the style of a notebook which is written in a disjointed style, suggesting that Emily's life is in pieces and that she can not keep her mind on one subject for a long period of time without the memories becoming too painful.

 

I thought that Heart-Shaped Brusie was a good book as it had a plot that kept me wanting to read on. I was hooked after the first paragraph;

"Juliet,

I know you've been waiting three months for this letter, but I have to start by saying this isn't an apology. ..."

 As a reader, I was hooked. Who is Juliet? Why does Emily need to apologise? Why isn't she going to apologise? Well, you just have to keep reading to find out!

As the book developed you learn more about the character of Emily, why she is like she is and you start to empathise with her. At first you think that Emily has been causing trouble all her life, why else would she be in the psychiatric unit of a young offenders institution, but as we read more into her life we discover she was a normal teenager, until one moment when her dad gets stabbed, from then on her life crumbles to pieces around her. Inside the institution Emily fights away the help she is given, refusing to talk about the incident with Juliet, until a photograph appears, then we learn everything.

In my opinion what makes Heart-Shaped Bruise a great read for any age is the way it makes you realise that there are always two sides to a story. In this case we at first sympathise with Juliet, her father is killed she enters witness protection and has to leave her whole life behind and live as a completely different person under a false name. The first thing you think of is how awful for her, and that when we learn it is because of Emily we prejudice her and think of her as evil. However, as we learn the series of events that took place before Emily started writing the notebook we learn that before the wall about her father's secret life she was happy, her father adored her, she had friends. She was a normal teenage girl. However, once this wall collapses and her father is imprisoned, Emily is sent to her uncle in Spain, away from home comforts in a foreign country. Then she makes the shocking decision to come back to London and befriend Juliet - if you read the book you'll find out why. Her life then from the outside seems normal, and then things go wrong, Juliet gets the guy they liked and everything goes downhill from there, and then the incident happens. As we learn more about Emily's motives we start to feel sorry for her and that Juliet actually wasn't as innocent as she first appears.

Overall, Heart-Shaped Bruise is a must read novel for people who like a crime novel which has an element of romance and mystery. I'd recommend it to young adults mainly because the main character is 18 so her life is relatable. Rating: 9/10



Where to buy: Amazon, Waterstones, WHSmiths,

Photo credit: Good Reads