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Lindsay Smith

A Darkly Beating Heart Hardcover – October 25, 2016

by Lindsay Smith (Author)

24 ratings

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A troubled girl confronts her personal demons in this time-travel thriller alternating between present day and 19th century Japan.

No one knows how to handle Reiko. She is full of hatred; all she can think about is how to best hurt herself and those people closest to her. After a failed suicide attempt at her home in Seattle, Reiko's parents send her to spend the summer with family in Japan, hoping she will learn to control her emotions. But while visiting Kuramagi, a historic village preserved to reflect the nineteenth-century Edo period, Reiko finds herself slipping backward in time into the nineteenth-century life of Miyu, a young woman even more vengeful than Reiko herself. Reiko loves escaping into Miyu's life . . . until she discovers Kuramagi's dark secret and must face down Miyu's demons as well as her own.

Reading age

12 - 18 years
Print length

272 pages
Language

English
Grade level

10 - 12
Lexile measure

750L
Dimensions

5.5 x 0.75 x 8.5 inches
Publisher

Roaring Brook Press
Publication date

October 25, 2016
ISBN-10

1626720444
ISBN-13

978-1626720442
UNSPSC-Code
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Kathleen Glasgow
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in Teen & Young Adult Fiction on Physical & Emotional Abuse
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Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Gr 10 Up—After an unthinkable disaster occurs, Reiko's parents send her to live with her relatives in Japan to help launch her cousin's budding career in the Japanese entertainment scene. The change from Seattle to Tokyo fuels Reiko's resentment toward her family, and she spends her waking moments plotting her revenge against her parents, her brother, and now her cousin and coworkers. The young woman is filled to the brim with ideas of destruction and violence. Are these hateful feelings finally evidence that she has always been a true monster, or has something else taken hold of her? Smith weaves a unique tale of Japan and the paranormal in this work of vengeance and teen angst. She excels at transporting the protagonist and readers to a believable feudal Japan—Smith has done her research about Japan during the Edo time period, and it is impressive to see glimpses of the past so eloquently represented in a work of fiction. The author does not shy away from the darkness of a deeply depressed individual, frankly mentioning thoughts and attempts of suicide, self-harm, and assault, and uses these thoughts to successfully sustain a dark mood throughout. The portrayal of a non-Japanese-speaking Japanese American teen's sense of isolation in Japan seems authentic, though it takes a backseat to the paranormal parts of the novel. VERDICT Readers will enjoy this twisted ride, despite its slow start and overly tidy ending. However, with highly descriptive scenes of violence, it is not for the fainthearted.—DeHanza Kwong, Central Piedmont Community College, Charlotte, NC

Review

"Intriguing. . . there is genuine spookiness in Reiko’s slow discovery that her choices are not really her own, and readers will definitely want to see Miyu stopped.―BCCB

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Roaring Brook Press (October 25, 2016)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1626720444
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1626720442
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 12 - 18 years
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 750L
Grade level ‏ : ‎ 10 - 12
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.75 x 8.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,109,300 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #93 in Teen & Young Adult Fiction on Self-Harm
- #331 in Teen & Young Adult Asian Historical Fiction
- #1,216 in Teen & Young Adult Historical Mysteries & Thrillers

Customer Reviews:
24 ratings

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Lindsay Smith

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Lindsay is the author of multiple novels for young adults, including Sekret and A Darkly Beating Heart, as well as the comic series Black Swan. She is the showrunner and lead writer for Serial Box's The Witch Who Came In From the Cold, a Publisher's Weekly Best Book of 2017. Her short stories and comics have appeared in the anthologies A Tyranny of Petticoats, Strange Romance Vol. 3, and Toil & Trouble and on Tor.com. She lives in Washington, DC with her husband and dog.

Customer reviews

5 star		39%
4 star		28%
3 star		26%
2 star		7%
1 star 0% (0%)		0%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Megan

I really enjoyed this book

Reviewed in the United States on January 14, 2017

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I really enjoyed this book. Women in fiction are always expected to be sweet, the caretakers, etc. If they're troubled, then they're the 'strong, independent' type. Reiko's type of character is always relegated to villain, and usually has all the depth and interest of a wet sheet of paper. But Reiko was hella interesting. She's angry, she feels trapped and unappreciated, like the freak and loser everyone puts up with. Her parents are rigid, and their attitudes led to her and her brother treating each other horribly. She made impulsive choices, bad choices, and trapped herself in a dark spiral. I loved how the end played out, I really really did. This was a great example of unreliable narrator and I loved that to death.

Women in society are always taught to be anything pretty much anything but angry. We bury it, choke on it, etc. The moment our anger comes out we're labeled crazy, overreacting, 'that time of the month' etc. So I loved seeing a young woman who was hurt and angry, for reasons right and wrong, and ultimately figured out how to deal with her problems on her own terms, in her own way.

I also love and adore she's bisexual, and that it was never some awful, poorly-portrayed Issue that became the story rather than being a wonderfully done component of her story.

I just really really loved this book, Reiko is a great character and I couldn't put the book down.

One person found this helpful

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CPA

I get it. She’s #angry.

Reviewed in the United States on July 22, 2018

Verified Purchase

I honestly haven’t been able to get past the first 5 pages. The author goes on and on about how angry Reiko is, and because it’s first-person, it’s like being inside the head of an extremely unhappy person. It’s not enjoyable at all, and I have not been presented with a real reason to feel sympathy for this girl.

Gave it three stars as I haven’t finished the book, and it’s not really fair to give it less. But from reading other reviews and from skipping ahead, I think I’m saving myself some time by not bothering to read this book.

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Alec & Victoria R.

One of the best reads of 2016

Reviewed in the United States on October 29, 2016

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After letting it sit, this has become one of my favorite books of 2016. Amazing job and I really enjoyed Reiko and Miyu and all the work Lindsay put into creating the world and history between the two girls. Absolutely loved it.

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Alyssa

I love Reiko. More angry girls in books please

Reviewed in the United States on November 27, 2016

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bisexual Japanese American girl revenge thriller. A lot of anger. I love Reiko. More angry girls in books please.

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Nicole

Just not feeling it....

Reviewed in the United States on October 23, 2018

The tone of this book was just weird, and the plot didn't make sense.

I am totally fine with a psychopathic or "dark" protagonist. I love unreliable narrators. This book gets two stars just for having a "bad" protagonist with complicated morals. I'm okay with the revenge plot. But I'm not okay with the lack of consistency in the plot-line, and the sudden jumps in character development that lead to the resolution. The resolution didn't make sense. I'll explain what I mean after a spoiler warning:

***SPOILER ALERT***

The protagonist is Reiko, an American girl of Japanese heritage from Seattle, who's staying in Tokyo with her uncle's family for her gap year out of High School. Reiko is angry at the world-- more specifically, her ex-girlfriend, her older brother, her parents, her cousin, and all her peers at her American High School. She's seething with hatred. She wants revenge on everyone who's wronged her. She wants to kill them all.

It's pretty intense, and while I'm not opposed to a dark, rage-filled main character, here's the thing... there's no conflict. Reiko is just angry. She has her reasons, and those reasons aren't fully revealed until the end of the book, but still - there's no major dilemma here. Reiko is just consistently angry. It's exhausting to read. Reiko's rage just made me tired.

Because Reiko is filled with rage and hatred, she attracts the attention of a vengeful spirit. Reiko finds kinship with the vengeful spirit (the hostile ghost of a young women named Miyu from Japan's Edo period) and allows the ghost to possess her.

(That's actually my favorite part of the book right here -- the flashbacks to Miyu's life in the Edo period. Miyu was pretty fascinating.)

So Reiko wants vengeance, and Miyu is a vengeful spirit. It's the perfect psychopathic partnership, until....

****MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD****

Reiko suddenly becomes self-aware of her own portion of responsibility for all the bad things that have happened to her, and decides to break the cycle of hate and revenge. Reiko takes control of her own emotions and chooses not to carry out Miyu's revenge killing-spree. Miyu's spirit-home is destroyed, Reiko lets go of her hate and anger, and all is well. Six months later, Reiko is attending her first semester of art college.

I just have some problems with this ending. First, it's really choppy and sudden, and doesn't quite fit the narrative created by Reiko's internal struggle. Second, I really expected a more sophisticated revenge scenario than just walking into a crowd of people and hacking everyone within reach with a sword. There's pages and pages devoted to Miyu's cold, calculated hatred. Surely she can plan a better (more effective) murder spree. Third, Reiko's conversion feels superficial. Her sudden epiphany of enlightenment seems forced. I just didn't buy her redemption, especially since all the people she hated were genuinely treating her badly. Suddenly she's all good with them? It's doesn't ring true. There's a vast middle ground between hating someone enough to kill them and being their friend. A more realistic resolution of the relationship with Reiko's cousin and co-workers would have gone a long way to making the ending more believable.

But I'm really stuck on # 2. Miyu couldn't plot a better mass murder than running around with a sword, hacking people? Really? I'm disappointed in this vengeful ghost.

SO..... to sum it up. I paid $9.99 to read this book on my Kindle app. I'm not going to ask for my money back, because the writing was professional enough for paid work. I liked the darkness of the protagonist, and the vengeful spirit was interesting when she wasn't disappointing. I learned some things about Feudal Japan and the rivalry between the Shogun and the Emperor. But Reiko exhausted me, and the ending wasn't believable or clever.

Frankly, I was rooting for Miyu.

Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2016

Combine angry and hurt girls + diversity + Japan setting (present and historical) + time travel + everything awesome, and you get the incredible A DARKLY BEATING HEART. From the first page, this gritty and dark novel consumes you, and it doesn’t stop until the last page (and if you’re me, you’re still going to be thinking about it months after).

There are few things I love more than a story that isn’t afraid to get intense, specifically when talking about the protagonist. Reiko’s journey is incredible, full of self discovery, pain, and finding hope. She starts the book suicidal, eager for vengeance, and eventually, obsessive about Miyu’s life. She goes through a lot before she reaches where she needs to be, and her path will make you frustrated, leave you in tears, give you a few laughs, more than a few swoons, and overall, make you want to flip back to page one and follow her journey again.

The writing is lush and brilliant, capturing modern day Japan and historical Japan wonderfully (and 10/10 will make you want to travel). The imagery is especially solid, and the visual descriptions paint a clear picture. This was my first Lindsay Smith novel, but I am absolutely going to go back and read her other books because of this incredible writing.

Final Verdict:

Evocative, powerful, and simply magnificent, Reiko and her story will tear into your heart and stay there for a long time.

One person found this helpful

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writingwithwolves

3.5 Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 24, 2018

Verified Purchase

This book was a lot more violent than I expected, especially considering it's YA, but I still found it to be a good & interesting read. I feel Lindsay has come up with an interesting way to explore how anger can overtake a teenager's mind, whilst also exploring an interesting part of history.

Trigger Warnings: mentions of suicide & suicidal thoughts, graphic self-harm, domestic violence mentioned, depression, homophobic/biphobic comments made by characters, ableist language toward own mental health & a lot of violence.

neuroooobit

großartiger Roman über Hass und Rache

Reviewed in Germany on March 1, 2017

Verified Purchase

Das Buch ist zwar auf English und es gibt keine deutschsprschige Fassung; aber ich werde die Rezension der Einfachheit halber auf Deutsch verfassen.
Durch Zufall bin ich auf dieses juwel gestoßen und spätestens nach 'troubled girl' und 'japan', landete die Leseprobe auf meinem Kindle - und auch dieses überzeugte mich. Lindsay Smiths Schreibstil ist angenehm zu lesen, die Metaphern zahlreich, kreativ und schön. Dafür verwendet sie aber auch ensprechend häufiger Wörter, die dem Nichtenglischmuttersprachler unbekannt sein könnten - ich hatte persönlich damit kein Problem. Hinzukommt noch die sporadische Verwendung japanischer Begriffe - ähnlich wie bei T.C. Boyles "Tortilla Curtain" mit Spanisch. Wer absolut keine Ahnung von Japan hat,könnte unter Umstände stellenweise auch die Stirn runzeln, verpasst aber nichts und wird trotzdem gut geführt. Handlungstechnisch braucht das Buch recht lange, bis es wirklich losgeht ( auf dem Kindle so 25%), aber ab da ist das Tempo angenehm und die Backgroundstory puzzelt sich immer mehr zusammen.
Man kann sich sehr gut in die Hauptcharakterin des Buches, die 18jährige Reiko und ihre Gefühlswelt hineinversetzen.
Die historischen Umstände sind gut recherchiert, wie es sich für einen Roman mit Zeitreisen gehört.
Ich hatte großen Spaß mit dem Buch. Es ist definitiv ungewöhlich und sehr gut geschrieben.

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