A review by sproutedpages
A Harvest of Hearts by Andrea Eames

adventurous medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

Thank you to Kensington Publishing/Erewhon Books and NetGalley for providing me with an eARC of this novel! All opinions within this review are voluntarily given and entirely my own.

Contrary to some of the other reviewers, I did really enjoy Foss as narrator— the dialect of her narrative voice added a great deal of depth to her character.

The most significant issue I take with this novel is that it is repeatedly emphasized that Foss, the protagonist, is ugly. “Ugly” is the word used to describe her more generally, but when describing the specific features that she feels make this so (red hair, round face, strong arms, solid figure, “my lumpen self”), it makes it seem that the author has written a fat protagonist without being willing to actually explore the intricacies of that. Fat is not synonymous with unattractive or ugly, but the pervasiveness of fatphobia certainly has an impact on what is excluded from desirability by society. The scene reflecting on the ‘Toad Wine’ incident begins to broach the topic in an abstracted way, but this is the closest it gets to being confronted by the text (as well as being the only elaborated example of Foss being appraised as ugly). It does seem that a fair amount of it is self-deprecating and internal rather than accurate or external, which also would have been very worthwhile to explore more in-depth.