If you’re looking for the perfect read for December and an impending Christmastime, then look no further than Jake Maia Arlow’s How to Excavate a Heart. It’s out now in the USA, and on Thursday in the UK, so you have no excuse for not picking it up! Start your December right and let this review tell you why!
Before we get to the review though, don’t forget you can follow Jake on instagram too.
It all starts when Shani runs into May. Like, literally. With her mom’s Subaru.
Attempted vehicular manslaughter was not part of Shani’s plan. She was supposed to be focusing on her monthlong paleoichthyology internship. She was going to spend all her time thinking about dead fish and not at all about how she was unceremoniously dumped days before winter break.
It could be going better.
But when a dog-walking gig puts her back in May’s path, the fossils she’s meant to be diligently studying are pushed to the side–along with the breakup.
Then they’re snowed in together on Christmas Eve. As things start to feel more serious, though, Shani’s hurt over her ex-girlfriend’s rejection comes rushing back. Is she ready to try a committed relationship again, or is she okay with this just being a passing winter fling?
How to Excavate a Heart
Jake Maia Arlow
Rep: Jewish lesbian mc & li, Indian American sapphic side character
CWs: past sexual assault, past controlling relationship
Release: 24th November 2022
In a year where, I have to admit, I’ve been reading fewer and fewer YA books, How to Excavate a Heart is a standout. At the halfway point in the year, I included this book in our most anticipated releases for July to December, and it didn’t disappoint in the slightest.
Probably what catches your attention at first in this book is the meet cute: I can’t think of many romances where that involves hitting the love interest with a car, but this one does. But not to worry! It all works out (although I wouldn’t recommend trying this one at home). I think this meet cute offers an insight of things to come in the book. For Shani, it puts into context how much of a (metaphorical) car crash her life seems to be at the minute.
Overall, this is a book about a girl, the subject of an unexpected break up, who is very much not recovered from it, but in recovering over the course of the book finds herself looking back on everything and thinking, hey, that was perhaps not as healthy as I remembered. And maybe those times I held off telling my best friend the details were because I knew that deep down. This, I think, is a perspective that is much needed in YA lit. If you pick up a YA book, you’re still more likely to find an f/f relationship presented as somewhat perfect (contrived misunderstandings for plot purposes aside), or, if you do find an imperfect (or outright toxic) one, it’s in the context of an m/f relationship. Coincidentally, while reading this one, I was making my way through Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold (a canonical lesbian text I would highly recommend), one of the chapters of which examines violence in lesbian relationships. This is not a book explicitly about that, but Boots of Leather made an interesting point that, as gay liberation has progressed, the willingness of people in lesbian relationships to talk about violence has decreased (in broad terms). In endeavouring to be perceived as totally unproblematic (and thus, deserving of gay rights), any suggestion of otherwise must be suppressed. The problem is men and only men.
So, to have a YA book that features, if tangentially and in the past, a toxic relationship between two girls can only be good, I think. To have Shani spend the book coming to a better place, realising how the relationship has caused her to push away her support system, and recognising all that happened to her, instead of brushing it off as a bad break up, is the most beautiful part of this book. I always bang on about how having visible lesbians in a positive context in YA lit is only doing good for the community, but we can hardly circle right back around to the issue as raised in Boots of Leather. It would be a detriment to us all to pretend that lesbians cannot be part of toxic relationships, including as young adults. And this is the perfect book for it: the narrative is very kind to Shani, it lets her make mistakes — mistakes which are down to the impact of her previous relationship — without villifying her. Of course she screws up! She’s barely eighteen! But she is allowed to do so and earn forgiveness. (And a lot of her mistakes make sense in the context of her character and the growth she is going through.) While this book is marketed as a romance, and I would say there are strong romantic elements to it, this is really what I feel it’s about: Shani and her personal journey. That’s what you’re rooting for here and, if that meant that Shani and May didn’t get their happily ever after, then that would have made sense too.
In addition to this, How to Excavate a Heart is a book that really absorbs you into its world. At one point, I looked up, incredibly confused why it wasn’t New Year’s Day (it was, in fact, the 19th of November…). That’s not only about the world the characters are in but also the characters themselves. Everyone jumps off the page here, particularly Raphael with his little snow booties!, and you find yourself not wanting to leave them behind by the end. I’m just saying, if Jake Maia Arlow ever felt the need to write a sequel about these characters, I would absolutely be on board with it.
So, as we approach Christmas (and/or any other winter holidays), this, I feel, is the perfect book to be reading. Get yourself a cup of hot chocolate and a warm blanket and curl up in its pages. Trust me, you won’t regret it!
So, have we convinced you that you want to read this book?
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