Matching Heartbeats

For fans of If He'd Been With Me and The Quiet Part Out Loud, a heartfelt and heartbreaking novel about endings and new beginnings.
 
Seventeen-year-old Susanna runs. Too much, if you ask her mother. She's at loose ends in Brooklyn; her best friend has moved away, her parents might be getting a divorce, and the only time she feels any peace is when her feet strike the pavement. She's less than excited to find out that she'll be joining her mom's two-month documentary research trip to the Arctic Circle. Not quite the change of pace she's looking for.
 
But Susanna's summer outlook abruptly changes when the film crew discovers a family living in the remotest reaches of the Northern Canadian wilderness. They've lived cut off from civilization for over twenty years, meaning that Benjamin—eighteen, with blue eyes and a smile as warm as the sun—has never known another life. He's a runner, too, and when he and Susanna meet, they strike up an unlikely friendship.
 
Benjamin's existence has always been isolated, but together under the never-setting midnight sun, he and Susanna begin to imagine his life somewhere else. Somewhere together. But when tragedy strikes, Susanna is left with the pieces of what could have been—and the bittersweet realization that she had to go thousands of miles to find what was there all along.

Valerie Best is the author of Matching Heartbeats and Rebel Darling and is a runner, a reader, and a 3rd grade hula hoop champ. She studied English Literature at Brooklyn College with a special interest in women in literature. She utilizes this mainly for critical readings of Babysitters Club books (with a special emphasis on the Super Specials). Rebel Darling is the first of three books she has upcoming with 8th Note Press.
Valerie lives in New York with her family, where she spends half of her time hunched over her desk writing, the other half unsuccessfully trying to convince people she invented girl dinner simply because she's really into crackers.