Cures for Heartbreak by Margo Rabb
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
It’s not so much that Mia Pearlman’s mother dies, but that it happens so quickly—just 12 days after being diagnosed with melanoma. She’d had a stomachache. Initially, this is Mia’s dilemma, and in the first few pages of Cures for Heartbreak, Margo Rabb introduces this dilemma exactly how one would expect a 15-year-old girl to comprehend it—with anger, sadness, and a glaring need to find any ounce of humor in a situation a million miles away from being funny. As the story progresses, Mia’s dilemma changes drastically as she comes to understand what the loss of her mother really means to her, especially in light of having nothing in common with her sister and recollecting the dysfunction in the relationship between her parents.
At the height of her grief, Mia is dealt another gut-wrenching blow when her father suffers a heart attack just three months after the death of her mother, and all at a time in Mia’s life when building friendships and finding love weigh heavy on her mind. In the hospital, she falls for a young doctor, and later, for a teenage boy who shares a room with her father. She nicknames him Cancer Boy, and throughout the rest of the novel, he haunts her by the mere fact that he represents the uncertainty of life and death, especially when she struggles with being a newly developed hypochondriac and the budding relationship between her father and another woman. Mia’s journey ends with the discovery of a new friendship, the development of a fresh bond with her sister and father, and in the end, Cancer Boy comes back to be the stepping stone toward a new beginning.
Mia’s voice is powerful—sometimes sad, sometimes angry, sometimes filled with sarcastic humor. I was immediately drawn to her struggle, not just at being a 15-year-old girl trying to make her way through life the way any other 15-year-old girl would, but at trying to survive with her father and sister in a house suddenly void of the mother she loved so much. The mother/daughter bond was both glorious and painful, making Mia’s struggle that much deeper. Rabb’s portrayal of Mia’s constant battle between grief and acceptance, between want and need is both beautiful and heartbreaking, and is a lesson for any writer wanting to tackle such a topic.
