“She has over two thousand five hundred miles between her and what’s coming.”
Each step on Annabelle’s 2,700 mile cross-country run brings her closer to facing a trauma from her past in National Book Award finalist Deb Caletti’s novel about the heart, all the ways it breaks, and its journey to healing. Because sometimes against our will, against all odds, we go forward.
Then…
Annabelle’s life wasn’t perfect, but it was full—full of friends, family, love. And a boy…whose attention Anabelle found flattering and unsettling all at once.
Until that attention intensified.
Now…
Annabelle is running. Running from the pain and the tragedy from the past year. With only Grandpa Ed and the journal she fills with words she can’t speak out loud, Anabelle runs from Seattle to Washington, DC, and toward a destination she doesn’t understand but is determined to reach. With every beat of her heart, every stride of her feet, Anabelle steps closer to healing—and the strength she discovers within herself to let love and hope back into her life.
Annabelle’s journey is the ultimate testament to the human heart, and how it goes on after being broken.
“Annabelle Agnelli is trying to hold it together in the parking lot of Dick’s drive-in.”
1. A cockroach heart has twelve to thirteen chambers, arranged in a row. If one fails, he barely notices.
2. Squid, and cuttlefish all have multiple hearts. An octopus has three.
3. The earthworm doesn’t have a heart at all. Instead, it has five pseudo-hearts wrapped around its esophagus.
4. Only the zebra fish, though, can do the truly necessary thing: if his heart is broken or damaged or destroyed, he can grow a new one. Deer cannot. Humans cannot.
“There are songs about the heart and poems about the heart and legends about the heart and facts about the heart. And, it’s true - the heart sings and speaks and tells its story. There are exact miles of arteries; there is the exact force of its beat. But the heart is also quiet. It is also a mystery. No one really knows how it goes on after being broken.”
“Who said anything about going home?”
“Where are we going then?”
“Where are we going? We’re going to D.C.! You run, I drive. I got the RV outside. It’s been almost six months since I’ve been on the road, and I’m losing my mind. Che Cavolo! Let’s get out of here.”
“Grandpa…” Annabelle can barely speak.
“Don’t get all mushy on me. Get your stuff. I got a pan of eggplant parmigiana in the oven.”
Annabelle’s route from Seattle to D.C.
“People plus people plus anger is how things can change.”
“What Annabelle does know now: The word courage comes from the Latin word coeur, meaning heart. The ba-bump of the heart leads to the next ba-bump. One step leads to another step. We go forward. Sometimes against our will, sometimes against all odds, we go forward. We have crossed the glacier, the dark land of grief. We have gone to the outer edges of our atmosphere and returned. The glacier and the dark land of grief will always be there behind us. The atmosphere will always be around us and above us. We’ll feel all of it there like a presence. What has happened will be a wind to fight against and a force that propels; it will be a guiding light in the blizzard, it will be a wrong turn. The trip across the glacier and through the dark land of grief is crooked and dangerous but sometimes beautiful. The voyage past the last edges of the universe is frightening and impossible but sometimes astonishing. Regardless - the steps, the ba-bump of the heart, pushes us to what’s next.”