"Emily Green and Me"
Written by Kathryn White
Published by: Umuzi
ISBN-13: 9781415200414
Reviewed by: Pixie Emslie
Genre: Fiction
The coverline calls this a "Love story of a heart interrupted". In some ways it is but it is a lot more as well.
When young Emily Green finally gets a new heart because a young boy was killed in an accident, she also gets a whole new life. And the boy gets to live on, his heart beating in her chest. One problem though is that he comes from a streetwise, rough background, seeing life very differently from Emily.
At times the story is funny, as when he gets to "see" what goes on in the girls' rooms, at the slumber parties and heaven help him, at more intimate moments as they begin to grow up. While his name is a secret (they never reveal whose heart you have been given), his comments are caustic, a commentary of the new upper class life he has entered.
At the same time the story is also enormously sad as Emily battles with returning to school, an overweight, sickly young girl who many of her friends had written off, expecting her to die. She has missed so much school she is put into a class way below her years, though her body is of course swelling and maturing. Her battles with teenagers, learning to be one of the crowd, smoking to prove she can (and what could be worse for her new heart) and learning to deal with her teachers and peers all over again.
Woven into it all is a family torn by the complexities of life in South Africa, dealing with the past and coping with the new; drinking and fighting; loving and living in a cynical portrayal of white adults in a BEE world.
Emily's attempts to dress like a teenager are influenced by the young man's heart beating away in her. When she takes the scissors to her hair it is to cut it short like a boy's; when she can't get into her jeans she cuts them, a bit like a boy's. All the while her heart (which is his heart) is yearning for the girl he wished he had been nicer to before he had "died". Now he appreciates that she too was poor and rough, but had such beautiful eyes, half gold, half brown.
At last Emily is invited to party in a suburb where the girls are loose , the drugs flow freely and not only kids from the upper classes get to go. There of course is the long lost girlfriend, older now, but still naïve and almost being seduced by some guy. But of course the heart is not having any of it.
And the inevitable ending is when her heart slowly compels Emily towards the girl he loved when he was properly alive.
Pixie Emslie is a South African journalist and communication consultant. She was on newspapers for years, worked on women's magazines in London and then ran her own communication consultancy for about 12 years. She was President of IABC Southern Africa (International Association of Business Communicators) and was given their Chairman's award in Toronto in 1995. She is currently a stringer for local newspapers.