Heartbreaker

A Novel

By: Claudia Dey

Narrated by: Jorjeana Marie, Claudia Dey, MacLeod Andrews

Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins

Publisher's summary

The love between a daughter and her mother - and the dark secrets they keep from each other - are at the heart of this wildly imaginative novel that combines elements of The Handmaid’s Tale, Stranger Things, and Twin Peaks.

An isolated town.

The remains of a mysterious cult.

And a woman who disappears.

It’s 1985. Pony Darlene Fontaine has lived all her 15 years in “the territory,” a settlement founded decades ago by a charismatic cult leader. In this strange town run on a sinister economic resource, the women crimp their hair and wear shoulder pads, and the teenagers listen to Nazareth and Whitesnake on their Walkmans. Pony’s family lives in the bungalow at the farthest edge of town, where the territory borders the rest of the wider world - a place none of the townspeople have ever been.

Except for Billie Jean Fontaine, Pony’s mother. When Billie Jean arrived in the territory 17 years prior - falling from the open door of a stolen car - the residents took her in and made her one of their own. She was the first outsider they had ever laid eyes on. Pony adores and idolizes her mother, but like everyone else in the territory she is mystified by her. Billie Jean refuses to describe the world she came from.

One night, Billie Jean grabs her truck keys, bolts barefoot into the cold October darkness - and vanishes. Beautiful, beloved, and secretive, Billie Jean was the first person to be welcomed into the territory. Now, with a frantic search under way for her missing mother, Pony fears: Will she be the first person to leave it too?

Told from the three unforgettable perspectives of a daughter, a killer dog, and a teenage boy named Supernatural, this novel is startling in its humor and wrenching in its wisdom about the powers, limits, and dangers of love. Heartbreaker is an electrifying pause-resister about a woman reinventing herself in order to survive - and a daughter who must race against the clock to untangle the mysteries left in her mother’s wake.

Narrators:

“Girl” section, read by Jorjeana Marie

“Dog” section, read by Claudia Dey

“Boy” section, read by MacLeod Andrews

©2018 Claudia Dey (P)2018 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Claudia Dey renders 1985 in perfectly crimped, shoulder-padded detail. Fifteen-year-old Pony Darlene Fontaine has lived her entire life in the ‘territory’, an isolated town founded decades earlier by an enigmatic cult leader and run on a sinister economic resource.... Come for the Shyamalanian premise. Stay for the hard-rock soundtrack.” (Chicago Tribune)

“One of the best surprises of 2018. A small rural town, a mother disappeared, a daughter left behind, secrets peeled away in layers. Weird, deeply creepy, written in punchy prose that rolls along and always leaves you wanting more.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

“It’s not the plot, the characters, or even the premise that makes this novel so extraordinary—it’s the voice, which is so utterly unusual and authentic as to seem like it’s really coming from a world of total isolation.... Dey strips away the trappings of modernity to show what humans truly are at base, while eschewing the usual cult narrative. The result is a whole-cloth, word-for-word triumph of imagination.” (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

“A fierce exploration of memory and zeitgeist...Heartbreaker is a darkly comedic weirdo of a book that pulls the string of nostalgia from one side while unraveling it from the other." (The Paris Review)

Extremely well written & performed

I will always sign on for anything performed by MacLeod Andrews, and he didn't disappoint. Likewise the other narrators were equally incredible, and gave moving performances. But it was the writing itself, and the way Claudia Dey chooses to engage dense, heavy, subject matter, that make this novel shine. Prose so well written it reads more like music than a book. Add to that some truly intriguing choices (like giving one of your PoV chapters to a dog, for instance, and managing to pull it off, too) and you've got yourself a uniquely powerful and enduring story. Listen. Thank me later.

Meh

I struggled to finish this audiobook. It lacked a lot. Narration was bland. Dragged on quite a bit.