You're Breaking My Heart: 03/30/24

You're Breaking My Heart by Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich (2024) is a story of three teens dealing with grief. Harriet Adu is at a new school and bears the identity of the girl with the dead brother. He died in a school shooting after she had wished him dead. Now she believes she cursed him and will do anything to get him back.

I honestly wasn't expecting this novel to go on as surreal of a tangent as it does. I'm terrible about reading blurbs, especially when I'm buying a new book from an author I've already read and enjoyed. A couple chapters, in, though, Harriet sees a note in the bathroom and grabs it. After that things start getting weird.

Initially my thought was to compare the novel to a manga/anime series, Toilet-bound Hanako-kun by AidaIro except with a traditionally female toilet ghost. Except that the book is set in New York and the main characters are Nigerian-American. But the inclusion of doorways to other worlds brings to mind Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children series. In the final act, though, of Harriet, Nikka, and Luke's adventure, the book switches to a play format, bringing to mind F. Scot Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned.

What I missed, though, even with water being a major motif in this novel, is that their trip to the underground prom and the beings they meet are probably jumbies. But these are jumbies who offer Harriet a way to reunite with her dead brother at an extraordinary cost. It's a price so dear she's finally forced to face her grief head on and admit to Nikki and Luke what she has internalized.

The novel with it's quest aspect sits on the Road Narrative Spectrum. As Nikki and Luke chose to go with her on a quest that's clearly been set up to lure only one person, they are collectively marginalized travelers (66). Their destination is a utopia (FF) somewhere under New York, though clearly not our mundane New York. Their route there symbolized by the spiraling water, stairs, as well as being called outright by the monsters, is a labyrinth (99).

Five stars

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