Author: Summary: When Georgia and her best friend, Riley, travel along with nine other suburban Pennsylvania kids to Anapra, a squatters' village in the heat-flattened border city of Juarez, Mexico, secrets seem to percolate and threaten both a friendship and a life. Certainties unravel. Reality changes. And Georgia is left to figure out who she is outside the world she's always known. (Goodreads)
My thoughts: I dove into this book knowing little more about it than that it was highly recommended by a blogger friend. Maybe it's just me, but I love diving in on little or no info and allowing the book to surprise me.
Surprise me it did, in the best possible way. While the story is set up to look like your basic coming-of-age, "who am I, anyway?" tale, it is so much more. It's about hope and despair, friendship and loss, bravery, fear, and (perhaps most of all) truth, the willingness to look at the world and truly see it.
Georgia's journey to the town of Anapra brings several issues in her life to a head. For the first time in her life, she is forced to see poverty, true tragedy, and the hope that allows one to keep going in the face of it. Her friend Riley's self-destructive behavior is getting hard to ignore and Georgia has to decide between friendship and confrontation. As her choices spin out of control, Georgia faces life and her own character in a new way. I was completely pulled into Georgia's situation, alternately cringing and rejoicing right along with her.
Kephart's writing is just beautiful. At first, I thought it was going to be too flowery for my taste, but by the end of the book, I was sad to leave her lyrical prose behind. There were so many phrases that I just loved, so many great pieces of wisdom. One of my favorites:
"Choose responsibility, and don't think that makes you someone's hero."
Final word: The Heart Is Not A Size is a passionate book, a story that grabbed my heart and left it changed. Well worth the read.
