My Heart and Other Black Holes

My Heart and Other Black Holes: Jasmine Warga 

I’ve only ever read two books about suicide and they were both meh. This book was FANTASTIC, I flew through it in a few hours. I want to recommend this book to everyone who not only likes young adult books, but has ever dealt with or known anyone dealing with suicide or depression.

This book is about two teens, Aysel and Roman. Roman is a good looking, tall, former basketball player, and Aysel is a Turkish physics nerd working at a telemarketing company. They are both super different but are united via Smooth Passages. Smooth Passages is a website that allows people to find suicide partners. Roman has a few requirements for his suicide partner: they can’t have kids, they can’t live more than an hour away from him, and the date has to be April 7^th. 

Throughout the story, they get really close and end up looking for excuses for seeing each other besides suicide planning. Eventually, Aysel begins to question if dying is really worth it. Roman opened up to Aysel before she opened up to him because she was afraid that he wouldn’t want to commit suicide with her after he knew the reason behind why she wanted to do it. After she became attached to him, she wouldn’t tell him the reason because she was scared that he would still want her to die or agree that she should die.

This book is so amazing. I was bracing myself for what I thought was coming at the end and I felt my heart breaking so many times. I felt the grief and depression from the characters and it was hard to read at times. I thought how they went from wanting to help each other kill themselves to wanting to save the other person is so tragically beautiful. I would recommend this book to anyone and give it 5 stars!

"Put your hand on a stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity." -Albert Einstein