Spoiler-free summary: A collection of four short stories about Asa, each detailing a moment in his life between the end of first grade up through seventh grade, dealing with friendship, love, and complicated parents. This was one of my favorites from when I was in middle school, and it holds up even better than I had expected — it manages to be repeatedly heartbreaking without being saccharine or maudlin or cheap.
Discussion: While I was reading through all the Newbery winners, I came across some of the critiques of the award, usually in the form of books that people didn’t think should have won. One was the idea that the medal was going to books that the adults on the committee liked, but that actual middle-grade children — the target audience of many of the possible options — didn’t care about. Criss Cross comes to mind as one I loved but was surprised at how bad many of the reviews were. And I guess that is always going to be a blind spot for me if I choose to keep following the Newbery mocks and reading through the Honors; I’m not a librarian or a middle school English teacher, so I can’t weigh those feelings in with my own.
Reading through the first story of What Hearts, I was struck at how much it felt like a story out of a literary journal instead of most of the Newbery books I have read. The language, for one thing — it’s not dumbed down — but also the plot arc. One of the reviews I saw on Goodreads was something like “I didn’t understand the point of the book,” and I get it, it isn’t explicit about it. It feels less like a book for children than a book about children for adults.
So I can imagine this being in that basket of “loved by the committee, no impact on children” books — except I loved this book when I was in middle school. I’ve never been someone who re-reads books I enjoyed, either then or now. I’ve always felt a guilt about all the books I’ve been meaning to read that I’m not getting to by going back over something I’ve already read, and it kind of makes the question of “what’s your favorite book?” a weird one for me, since how can my favorite be one I’ve only read once? But What Hearts might be the only exception to that, I read it a lot. It was an odd feeling reading it this time, the vague sense of knowing what was coming next, the repeated cases of “oh yeah, that scene/sentence/image!” It’s been 25 years, so the memories were fuzzy, but a lot were still buried up there.
The last story, the titular “What Hearts,” was the one that I especially loved then. Since each of the stories is barely connected to the others, it was easy to pick up the book and read a random one out of context, and that was the one I read the most. Being the same age as Asa when I was reading it, I 100% understood how important a crush was and how amazing it would be to reveal it to the person and have it be reciprocated. Imagining, then, what it would be like to have to leave right after that happened was a big deal, and the final scene with the phone call, and how Asa reacts to it, was a special kind of sadness to experience. It still hits on the re-read all these years later — like I say in the summary, the entire book is heartbreaking in a very genuine way. And on the whole, this book holds up ridiculously well, I think I enjoyed it just as much this time as I did then.
A little story about another Newbery connection for me on this book. At some point, my middle school librarian gave my class a challenge: if anyone could read The Story of Mankind, the first (and longest) Newbery winner, they’d win a reward of picking out a book from her library cull pile to take home and keep. I jumped at the chance and made sure I was the one to check out the library copy’s first — I’m pretty sure I was the only one who ended up caring — and I did it. The book I chose was What Hearts. (And after my read through of the entire Newbery list a few years ago, I’m now part of the rare club of people who has read The Story of Mankind twice. I don’t recommend it!)
Next on the list is Grace Lin’s Where the Mountain Meets the Moon.
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