Review: A Little Heart: A Tale of Love and Destiny

A Little Heart: A Tale of Love and Destiny by Vladarg Delsat
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I received a pre-publication version via Netgalley for review, and as I often do, I offer the disclaimer that it may receive more editing before publication, but that even if it does, there are enough issues that inevitably some, perhaps many, will be overlooked. Mostly, those issues stem from the author not having English as his first language (probably not even his second); the English is frequently not at all idiomatic, though I only hit one sentence that I found completely incomprehensible. He also makes a couple of mistakes that plenty of native English speakers make, punctuating dialog tags as separate sentences rather than part of the same sentence, and splicing sentences together with commas that should be separated by periods. They're all understandable issues, and not really the author's fault, but they do stand in the way of immersing into the story.

But what about the story? This was the more serious issue for me, and was what caused me to give up on it halfway through. Although the setting of much of the book is a magical school of the kind that has become so popular, there's very little focus on either the magic or the school. The magic, in fact, is not much more than a complication (it's incompatible with the technology that the main character, Helen, needs to help her deal with her serious medical issues), and that complication is quite easily resolved by more magic.

In fact, there's not a lot of conflict or complication in general, apart from the MC's frequent medical emergencies, and they're all resolved almost as soon as they arise. Everyone is kind and understanding and helpful, apart from a couple of adults who behave badly and instantly get fired, never (as far as I read) to be heard from again. None of the kids are nasty to the MC for more than a brief moment, and most of them are instantly and perfectly supportive and remain completely undeveloped, indeed undifferentiated, as characters.

Particularly saintly (and more developed) is Philip, who instantly befriends the MC when she arrives at the magic school and becomes her caregiver, selflessly helping her with a maturity well beyond his twelve years. The whole middle of the book then largely consists of: medical emergency, Philip does something that saves Helen, Helen gushes about how he's her angel and as long as he's with her she'll be fine, repeat. This became cloying to me after a while, and lost any sense of momentum.

I checked the ending to see if it was what I thought it would be, and unfortunately it was. (view spoiler)[Any discussion of disability fiction I've read always brings up the problem of the "cure narrative" - that the only way most writers can think of to wrap up a story about a disabled person is to have them be cured, which obviously is not the experience of the vast majority of disabled people, and which implies that this is the only way in which their story can end happily. This book ends with Helen cured, by means of what is almost literally a deus ex machina (though there is a bit of foreshadowing). (hide spoiler)]

The author is from Russia originally, though ethnically German, and it struck me that a Russian author trying to write a book that isn't about suffering is a bit like a British author trying to write one that isn't about social class, or a French author one that isn't about sex, or a Chinese author one that isn't about family: the book will end up being about that anyway, just in a different way from usual.

Let's be clear: as a caregiver myself, or just as a human being, it's great to see a book which centrally features disability and the many challenges it brings for both people with disabilities and their caregivers. The author, according to his bio, has personal experience of raising children with disabilities, and it's the main theme of his writing. It's just that, for me, there needed to be more tension in the struggles, and the solutions needed to be less instantaneous, and the characters more human and less perfectly saintly, for it to work well as a story. For me, it falls into the category of "Worthy, but not especially enjoyable as fiction."

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