My Heartbeat Themes

The McConnells are the poster family for dysfunctional communication skills. Everyone would rather be tortured than have a conversation about anything remotely confrontational, and this causes them...

My Heartbeat as all about family and what it means to be so connected to a small group of people whether you want to be or not. For James, family is about neglect, convenience, and resentment. For...

Freymann-Weyr didn't set out to write the definitive tome on coming-of-age while struggling with the questions of sexual identity, but in My Heartbeat, she certainly did a great job of capturing th...

Ellen comes from a family that holds intellectualism in very high regard, so literature plays a pretty big role in how she interacts with them, especially when it comes to her father. He enjoys rec...

In her quest to understand what it means to be gay, Ellen discovers the existence of unwritten social rules regarding homosexuality. And as she does, Ellen ponders and evaluates the idea that whom...

Coming of age can mean different things for different people, and this is certainly true for James, Link, and Ellen as they navigate the choppy waters of adolescence in My Heartbeat. For Ellen it i...

For much of My Heartbeat, Ellen is stuck in the middle of a complicated love triangle between herself, James, and the mercurial Link. A fourth side of the triangle (so wait, it's a love square?) is...

The characters in My Heartbeat suffer not so much from physical isolation, but from a self-imposed emotional isolation. Ellen spends the majority of the novel trying to avoid any attention whatsoev...