Book Review: Where The Heart Is

Where the Heart is by Billie Letts is a story about a teenage girl who has to go through a lot of hardships in order to take care of not only her unborn baby, but herself as well. In the beginning of the story her boyfriend, Willy Jack, leaves her alone at Wal-Mart, in a city they’ve never been to, to take care of herself. Novalee, the soon-to-be-teenage-mother, is only 17, and unfortunately unlike the cliché, has bad luck when the number seven comes into play. Whenever she hears the number she automatically knows something bad has happened, or will happen, and that’s how she knew Willy Jack abandoned her.  She went in to go to the bathroom and get some “polka-dot flip-flops,” and the cashier handed back to her $7.77.There she was, alone in the Wal-Mart parking lot with nothing but her plastic beach bag and flip-flops, sweating from the beating sun and seven months pregnant.

                This is novel was one of my favorites to read for a few reasons, the main one being how original it was. Who has a baby in Wal-Mart? Novalee’s a character who’s innocent and good-hearted, along with that she’s young hearted as well as physically young, too young to care for a baby some would say but she does it extremely well. She has nothing but hopes and dreams for her future with her baby. While in the car with Willy she’s telling him about what type of house she wants and how she wants to sit on the patio with her baby and drink chocolate milk while they watch the sun go down. Novalee’s never  lived in a house that wasn’t moveable, she’s never actually settled down anywhere, she’s always been on the move, one place to another, and all she dreams of is to have a place to stay, where she doesn’t have to worry about getting up and leaving the second things go wrong, she dreams of having a home.

                That’s when she meets Sister Husband, a warm character with a heart of gold. She tells Novalee about home, and what it is. “Home is where your history begins,” she also tells her, “Home is the place that’ll catch you when you fall. And we all fall.” When Novalee has no other place to go, Sister Husband takes her in as if she’s family and treats her just that way. All the characters in this book are different and they do a good job of showing the difference between good and bad between people. When Novalee’s talking to Lexie, her best friend who’s a single mother of four children, there was a scene when Lexie and her children had just been beaten by a man Lexie thought would be “the one,” but he turned out to be a child molester and just an overall horrible person because of his actions. But what Novalee tells Lexie when she asks her what’s she’s going to tell her children, Novalee says, “Tell them we’ve all got meanness in us… But tell them that we have some good in us, too. And the only thing worth living for is the good.” Novalee has hope that the bad people can change, she believes that not all bad people are entirely bad and at the same time not all good people are entirely good. There’s good and bad in all of us.

                Willy Jack tells her in the beginning, before he abandoned her, that he couldn’t feel the beat of the baby’s heart. Throughout his life, everything he does revolves around the beat of a heart. He writes a song about it after he dies and is brought back to life during his stay in prison. Whenever he gets drunk he hears Novalee’s voice and thinks about her, and she always ends up saving him in some way even though she’s never with him again. That is until he gets his legs run over. She visits him in the hospital, she makes the drive to the hospital to find out that he had been on his way there to find her and Americus, the now seven year old little girl that he had no part in raising. When Novalee sees him again she confronts him about leaving her and he tells her that he came back to tell her something about the baby. He wanted to right a wrong he did on the day he left them. He tells her how he told Novalee he didn’t feel the baby’s heart, he reminded her how he said he didn’t feel “the little bomp… bomp… bomp..,” and of course Novalee remembers, but then he tells her that he lied. And he did feel the heart, he felt where the heart was and wasn’t sure why he lied about it, but then he asks why does anyone lie? He suggests that everyone has meanness in them and that’s overall what the book is about and what it’s showing, that everyone has meanness in them, but there are ways to right wrongs. There are ways to fix the lies that eat away at you, and there are ways to become good after all you’ve done is bad. That’s what this book is about.

Blog #5

I believe that for a book to be considerd non-fiction, it should be just that. Non-fiction. The only time where I see it to be okay is in cases like The Glass Castle, where she was a child and she may not recall exactly what she said but she gets the idea of what she said. I'm talking about dialogue. I think she has the basic idea of what she and other people said back then, and who knows, maybe it is exact. But there's almost never really a time when people recall exactly what they said to one another.

The half-truths matter when it comes to what type of story you tell people you're gonna sell. If you say it's fiction then it doesn't matter at all, but if you're gonna sit there and tell everyone that it's a memoir when in actuality a lot of it is made up, then turn around, admit it's only five percent true, then that gives reasonable doubt if any of it is true. So moral of the story. Either it's fiction, or non-fiction. When it comes to events and really important things that are said or done, those have to be exact for it to be considered a memoir or non-fiction.