What do you think?
Rate this book
Until Your Heart Stops-Reader'
Book by MCNALLY, T.M.
Paperback
First published June 1, 1992
24 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 9, 2012
An exploration of the passage from adolescence to adulthood: which means it's about all those things that lots of other novels are about. And so one's decision to read it instead of lots of other novels needs to be pretty convincing.
I'm here to convince.
Until Your Heart Stops is written so so so well that you'll blow through it like the period before lunch in high school. It's also got a lot of subtle things going on that are so under-the-radar that at first you think you're reading a bad book. For instance, the first third of the novel introduces a stunning amount of binaries, like sane/insane, smart/stupid, young/old, virgin/sexually-active, hot/cold, rainy/dry, and many others. The second third develops them. It begins to seem amateurish. And then the last third initiates the process of unraveling all of them, which is also a metaphor for the characters who are growing up and finding out that not everything is as it seems. So in this way it's like Derrida but embedded within a simple story about high school seniors who are trying to make it to adulthood with their lives and sanity intact.
And if that doesn't tickle your fancy, this might: a defining characteristic of good writing is that it makes you stop, often, and remark "That's exactly what that's like! Perfect!" By the end of this novel you'll have done this so often it'll become routine and thus potentially boring. But if that's the only thing that drags at all? Pretty fantastic.
I'm here to convince.
Until Your Heart Stops is written so so so well that you'll blow through it like the period before lunch in high school. It's also got a lot of subtle things going on that are so under-the-radar that at first you think you're reading a bad book. For instance, the first third of the novel introduces a stunning amount of binaries, like sane/insane, smart/stupid, young/old, virgin/sexually-active, hot/cold, rainy/dry, and many others. The second third develops them. It begins to seem amateurish. And then the last third initiates the process of unraveling all of them, which is also a metaphor for the characters who are growing up and finding out that not everything is as it seems. So in this way it's like Derrida but embedded within a simple story about high school seniors who are trying to make it to adulthood with their lives and sanity intact.
And if that doesn't tickle your fancy, this might: a defining characteristic of good writing is that it makes you stop, often, and remark "That's exactly what that's like! Perfect!" By the end of this novel you'll have done this so often it'll become routine and thus potentially boring. But if that's the only thing that drags at all? Pretty fantastic.
January 29, 2008
Until Your Heart Stops is one of the strongest adolescent-centered novels I've read in years. The language is well-crafted and genuine, and the characters, especially the teens, are vivid in the dramatics of their feelings. This should be on the reading list of anyone interested in adolescent development, though it seems like novels as unstereotypical as this one are becoming harder to find. Try A.M. Homes's Jack, and Brian Hall's The Saskiad.
January 9, 2009
I loaned this book, and never got it back, and I *need* to have it back. McNally is equally adroit with the novel form as he is with short stories.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews