A tragic and heartwarming story!
The Heartbeat Hypothesis by Lindsay Frydman, a standalone NA romance
I chose to read The Heartbeat Hypothesis because the excerpt sounded amazing. I’ll be honest, the cover didn’t hurt anything either!
Audra was born with a hole in her heart. When she turned 16, she was lucky enough to find a matching donor and she was given a heart transplant. Two years later, she is in college and living a fairly normal life. But Audra wants to know Emily, the girl who once owned her heart. She begins stalking her Instagram page and sees that Emily had created a list of things she had done. She had each “done-it” photographed and she posted the beautiful pictures. Audra wanted to recreate her list as a tribute to Emily and gets in touch with the photographer, Emily’s brother Jake. Tragedy brings Audra and Jake closer together but it may also tear them apart.
This story was beautifully written. The characters were complex and realistic. Many of Audra’s reactions to the events in her life were similar to what my own would be. The story goes in a direction I did not anticipate and it was refreshing that it was not predictable. Although some tissues were required, I never had a moment when I wanted to stop reading.
Although there are some adult themes, this story could be read by a younger audience. This will become a favorite of those who enjoy Colleen Hoover and Mia Sheridan.
I give this book 4.5 stars. I will be looking to get this on paperback as soon as I can.
I reviewed this book for the Just North Of Normal blog. www.cmmcoy.com/blog

Certainly a unique story. Good overall writing. Kept me interested.

**I received a copy of Heartbeat Hypothesis from Net Galley and Entangled Publishing in exchange for a voluntary and honest review**
The Heartbeat Hypothesis by Lindsey Frydman is the author's debut novel and after reading this story I have to say that it was a great first novel. It did drag a big in the middle but what novel doesn't?(within reason)I would give the book a 4.8 stars for her first effort Jake did have issues with his parents but having finished the book he turn out to be a well adjusted adult.

What would you do if in order to keep living you needed a heart transplant? Would you want to know who was the donor or approach the donors brother with a request no matter how odd it would be? Audra Madison received a heart transplant from a young girl and when given the option to know who the donor was she decided that she did want to know and sent a letter with a request, she would like to complete the her "Done it list" on Instagram. Audra finds out that her brother is at the same college that she just started attending and approaches Jake with a request to not only finish the list but name it "Cheez its". Will he accept her request? What if she decides to attend a memorial for his sister and it causes not only bad memories for Jake's parents? How would you feel? or better yet would you even want to know the donor or their family? Its a tough question and The Heartbeat Hypothesis deals with the tragedy of the loss of a young life but how Audra and Jake seem to be destined to find each other and help each other grieve and move on with their lives. There is another side story with Audra's best friend, Kat and how it effects her when a death occurs and how she deals with the grief.

Jake Cavanaugh misses his sister terribly and as a junior majoring in Photography he encouraged Emily to do a bucket list of sorts with him taking the photos. When he is contacted by the recipient of her heart, he doesn't know what to think but he goes ahead with the meeting with Audra. Everyone has a skeleton in the closet but its his family who deals with emotions by medicating themselves and he also feels that he somehow let Emily down when he went to college leaving her at home. Little does he know but somehow his sister decides to figure out how to get Audra and Jake together using her "Done it" list. It will take everything he has to redo her list with Audra but it will help both grieve and move on to explore if they can have a relationship with both memories and making new ones for themselves.

You'll need a few tissues for the ending but all in all it was a great debut novel and I look forward to new books by Ms. Frydman.

I won't lie, the cover caught my interest with this book the most. I love photography and I was I excited to see how the author wound that theme into the main plot of this book.

In general The Heartbeat Hypothesis was a good read. It had a steady pace that built slowly and Audra and Jake's friendship was given time to grow and develop. In essence it was a gentle read about two characters coming to terms with past events in their own lives and learning to live with the help of the other.

I will admit I did expect it to be a bit more emotional than I found it to be. For some reason I expected a few tear jerking moments, but there wasn't. I also thought it ended rather abruptly. The book seemed to go off on a tangent and to get back to its original meaning it had to be sped up. While it answered all questions and tied everything together satisfactorily, I would have liked the easy pace to have continued until the end.

Overall, for a debut book it was good. I might have gone in expecting more, but it was an easy read that was more about friendship developing than romance. It was a nice change from the usual romances I read.

Audra Madison knows she's lucky to have gotten a second chance at life when she received Emily Cavanaugh's heart. Now she's determined not to let anything stand in her way of living life to the fullest and creating memories that Emily should have been experiencing. But first she needs someone to chronicle her journey and there's no one she'd rather want by her side than Jake Cavanaugh. He's a photographer and just happens to be Emily's brother. But when secrets from the past start to unravel and Audra finds herself unable to stop from wanting to help Jake discover the truth of what happened to his sister once and for all, will she lose the man she's falling in love with?

I'm not usually one to read New Adult Romance unless I really like the blurb, which I did for this book, so I'm glad I chose to read it as it was a delightful read full of plot twists that made me sympathize with everything Audra goes through that shows her life's too short. Right from the beginning, this story immediately drew me in because of what the heroine is going through and what she wants to do to honor the life of the teenage girl whose heart Audra ended up with to save her life.

The dialogue was intense due to the heroine's back story, believing she was going to die until she received a heart transplant. However, it was plot twists in what happens to Audra and what happens to the heroine's best friend that made this story a real page turner for me, even if they did make me cry. How much does the heroine have to endure before she finds happiness? Will she be able to help Jake overcome his past by finding the truth of what happened to his sister? Yet, there were also some light-hearted moments throughout this story that made me smile. Audra is good for Jake. She's the one person he can completely open up to about his past, which was needed to help him heal.

Both Audra and Jake were fantastic characters, and I loved every moment they conversed whether Jake was being friendly towards the heroine or whether he was being a complete jerk. Audra is strong and brave when it comes to everything she goes through and I liked that she didn't give up on Jake in the moments where he tried to push her away, because he believed he wasn't good enough to be her friend let alone anything else. Indeed, she's a fighter when it comes to her condition, dealing with her grief and showing Jake that he's not alone. That she's there for him, if he'll let her in. While Jake, he's been through so much and losing his sister was hard. He hasn't dealt with his grief and has closed himself off from getting close to people, yet Audra manages to break through his walls. And really, I was cheering for her every step of the way because Jake needed her.

Overall, Ms. Frydman has penned a fantastic read in this debut book, which was filled with plenty of emotion that I felt along with the characters, especially the heroine. The way this story ended had me worried due to Jake's reaction to what Audra does when it comes to trying to find the answers he wants, but I was glad he made things right between them. Besides, what Audra did and what it led to helped him find some peace to his past in the end, which he desperately needed and deserved because of what he believed really happened to his sister. I would recommend The Heartbeat Hypothesis by Lindsey Frydman, if you're looking to read your very first New Adult Romance, or if you enjoy books by authors Sophia Henry, Ophelia London or Jennifer Blackwood.

Reading 'The Heartbeat Hypothesis' is like hearing a new voice that speaks out for teenage angst that's fully captured in its powerful, moody glory. But the subjects that Lindsey Frydman deals with here are difficult, heavy and weighed down with the solemnity of death, life and deception.

Here, high school melodrama is eschewed in favour of melancholic episodes, wistful photographing of lonely landscapes and soulful conversations as teenagers live through and attempt to define how cosmic justice (if I could ever find a better term) has played a role in their lives. It's more than a search for identity now; their questions turn into a search for the reasons for living (deep, angsty stuff) as the beginning chapters made me hold my breath in anticipation of how things would develop between a girl who has been given a new lease of life with the heart of a dead girl and her brother who clearly hadn't yet sorted out his grief.

Both Jake and Audra are damaged in their own ways and while I liked them to begin with, I think I couldn't understand the tangent the story took towards the end. I couldn't understand, least of all, why Audra suddenly poked her nose into Jake's business when she had no right to, leaving us with a so-called mystery that would never be solved. In fact, by the time I was through the last quarter, nothing seemed to fall into place except that after a string of tragedies, Jake and Audra kind of thought they could still belong to each other. Frydman's nuanced writing draws out Audra's emotions perfectly, yet only her motivations and sense of purpose are made clear. On the other hand, Jake himself and his family remained as frustratingly obscure as ever, without any light shed on the events a few years earlier that I'd frankly expected.

Consequently, if I was overwhelmed in the beginning, I finished the story more bewildered than satisfied, wondering if there was some chunk of the book that I'd actually missed.

The greatest gift on earth is that of life, some would say that to be given a second chance at life, a new heart, a new ray of hope for your family is the best thing, but not Audra, not when she knows the young beautiful Emily had to die in order for her to live.

Audra reaches out to Emily's family, and she meets Jake, Emily's brother- the guy who should have "Brood" as his middle name. He's a photographer and she has this crazy idea of doing what Emily did based on the photos on her Tumblr page.

The question on my mind as I kept turning the pages was, "would Jake ever forgive himself for not being there to save his sister?" There is a shift of focus somewhere in the middle when it dawns on the reader that life brings down everyone, and grief consumes everyone in their own way and pace.

The Heartbreak Hypothesis takes you on a journey of love, forgiveness and most of all...healing from grief. It is not an easy journey but as Jake and Audra learn, it is a journey worth making.

I really loved this book.

Honestly, 3 stars is probably not indicative of how much I enjoyed most of this book. I say most because, for a good three quarters of it, I was really liking it. The writing was good, the story was engaging, possibly the only issue I had was how quickly they got together (I feel like a slowburn would have suited this a lot more). And then the last quarter happened.

It started off with the reveal that Jake (the love interest) had been abused as a child, as in beaten to the point where he thought he would die. Implied multiple times this happened. And because we're all about using abuse as an angsty plot point apparently, this is only ever mentioned once. Never past that.

Then, at the same time as he's telling Audra about this, he makes this comment:

"But... what about your mom? I mean, was it just your dad who..."

"My mom couldn't stop him, even if she'd wanted to. Sometimes I don't know if she did want to."

Because if she'd wanted to stop him, wouldn't she have left? For her own sake? To save her children?

"She's mentally ill," he said, sliding off the bench. "But it's never been a good enough excuse for me."


Where to even start with this. The assumption that she didn't want to stop him because she didn't leave? The victim blaming? The implication that her having a mental illness was behind her not leaving? The fact that he thinks she's using that as an excuse not to leave? It's all messy. And I wouldn't have minded it so much if the narrative had called all these things out. But guess what. It does not. This is brought up this single time, and never challenged. Just thinking about this quote makes me angry and I'm starting to wonder if I shouldn't rate this lower.

Tack onto this, the fact that, at the end, his mother burns down their house, killing herself and his father, and that this is painted as her "cracking"? Even messier.

There's also a point where Audra reads Jake's diary (violating his privacy much?) because she's so curious, and the contents of this diary imply that Jake has had or is still having suicidal thoughts. But don't worry (Jake says), he only ever thought about it, only ever planned where he might do it, he never really considered going through with it. And with that, this plot point is just brushed aside.

With all this, I feel like this book had ample opportunity to explore a love interest with a mental illness. The question is, whether I would actually have wanted it to, given how much it demonises his mother who does have one (an unidentified one, too. So don't worry, we aren't just demonising a single mental illness! It's equal opportunity demonisation).

So yeah. On second thoughts, I'm rating down.

"sometimes grief is the price you pay for love."

lindsey frydman's debut novel, the heartbeat hypothesis, pushes its characters to the brink with the amount of loss they suffer through. audra madison is a heart transplant recipient. two years after her transplant she's decided to honor the life of her donor, trying to recreate her "done-it" list. but in order to complete the list she needs a photographer, and she'd like to use the same photographer emily did, even if it turns out to be emily's brother, jake.

audra knows that she is asking a lot of jake. and there are so many lines she crosses every time they get together. she wants to know about emily. she wants to know more about jake. she feels like she has no right to be asking these questions because emily died and she lived. and jake keeps blowing hot and cold and audra can't tell if it's that he hates her or if he hates that he likes her or if he just likes her. and the confusion is killing her, because the other terrible thing she's realizing is that she's half in love with jake and it seems to wrong, except when she's with him and there are those moments where everything just feels right.

and then audra's best friend is killed in a car accident and jake's family dies and it's so over-the-top. did these characters really need to lose everyone in their lives? jake wasn't even on speaking terms with his parents and he had questions about how emily really died, questions that remain unsolved by the end of the novel. mainly because there is no real way to answer those questions satisfactorily, and also because how she died doesn't matter. she did and audra lived and that's what matters.

so this book is marked by loss and depression and the knowledge that we only have a finite set of heartbeats. audra in some ways feels as if she is living on borrowed time, her heartbeats belong to emily. but emily's heart is audra's now. and it's her body and brain that keep it going. and maybe the heartbeats we have are finite. but that doesn't mean we can't savor every moment of them. through all the darkness, both jake and audra are drawn to light. the fact that jake is a photographer and is constantly working with light is no coincidence.

their journey is one filled with shadows and hurt and pain, and they aren't left without scars. but in the end, this book is about hope. it's about finding all the light and using it to make something beautiful out of all the dark shadows. a photograph. a new love. art. something to hold onto.

Gorgeous book! I was sucked in right from the first page! This story was beautiful! It was about forgiving and moving on, doing things that make you happy. And even if something bad happens, you just have to have faith that you'll make it out to the other side. 5 stars!