The Mighty Heart of Sunny St James

The Mighty Heart of Sunny St James by Ashley Herring Blake is a big, aching, funny story for 10 year olds about a girl who gets a new heart and decides to start again.

What happens

It opens with Sunny in a hospital bed the night before her transplant, cheerfully explaining exactly what she thinks is about to happen. The scalpel. The squelching. The bit where she is dead for a few minutes while they swap the hearts over. Kate keeps telling her to picture nice things instead.

Sunny is twelve. She fainted in the playground when she was ten, and she has spent most of the two years since on a sofa, watching the sun cross the sky.

Kate is not her mother. Kate was her mother's best friend, and she has raised Sunny since she was four, on an island off South Carolina, above a bookshop called Cherry Picked Books.

Then the new heart works. And two things happen at once.

The first is the New Life Plan, which Sunny sets out in three steps. Do the amazing things her old heart never let her do. Get a best friend again, because she is not walking into a new school without one. And kiss a boy.

The second is that her mother walks into the hospital room.

Lena has tattoos of a million suns, and the same freckles, and the same amber eyes. In Sunny's head she has always been a mermaid, because a mermaid leaving a land child behind is a much easier story to carry than the real one.

I loved Sunny's voice. She is cheeky about dying because that is the only way she can hold it. She talks to the person whose heart she borrowed. She writes songs that refuse to rhyme. She walks into the sea for the first time in two years and cries, and is not one bit ashamed of it.

This one needs a proper flag before you hand it over, because there's a lot in it. Open-heart surgery described from the inside. A father who died before she could know him. A mother who is an alcoholic, who once left Sunny alone in a supermarket, and who gave her away. Sunny wanting her first kiss very badly and working out for herself who she actually wants to kiss. And a donor who had to die so that she could live, which she never lets herself forget.

It is written with enormous warmth and there is no villain anywhere in it. But this is a book for a child who is ready to sit with sad things, and I would read it alongside them rather than after.

What to read next

There's a boy here whose entire life has happened inside one hospital room. In The Bubble Boy, Joe is eleven, he has never once been outside, and his visitors wear overalls in case they carry in something that could kill him.