Bookreporter.com - IRREPLACEABLE by Stephen Lovely

IRREPLACEABLE
Stephen Lovely
Voice/Hyperion
Fiction
ISBN: 9781401322823

Alex Voormann's young athletic wife, Isabel, is hit and killed by a car. Isabel was an organ donor. Alex and his mother-in-law, Bernice, are barely able to register their conflicted emotions blurred by grief when the medical team comes in to harvest the organs of the person they each loved the most in life.

A year has now passed. Alex, who is actually an archeologist, is stuck in more ways than one. At one time he had a job he loved, doing rescue excavation for the state of Iowa. He and his team would travel to the sites of future roads to be sure there was nothing precious present that could be destroyed by the impending construction. Alex had shared his love for science with Isabel, who was a student working for a degree in plant biology. However, a year before Isabel’s life was taken, Alex was laid off due to budget cuts. His search for a worthy replacement job had been fruitless. He worked for a while as a waiter, expecting to pick up the job search again. But when Isabel died, he lost all hope and concentration, losing himself in the pages of tabloid magazines and in video arcade games.

These days Alex passes time in a job he hates, grading student essays for a company that scores papers for schools across the nation. His boss, Diane, constantly questions his scoring methodology and demands that he reconsider his grades. Alex continues to live in the apartment he and Isabel shared with their dog, Otto. At home, he finds yet another grateful letter in his mailbox from the recipient of Isabel's heart, a woman named Janet Corcoran. Alex feels nothing but bitter hatred toward Janet. He only wishes she would quit trying to express her messages of indebtedness. They only serve to remind him of how much he misses his wife.

Isabel's mother, Bernice, does not share Alex's distaste for Janet. Alex and Bernice spend quite a bit of time together, forming something of a little family in their mutual despair over the loss of Isabel. Bernice and Alex have begun renting Japanese monster movies to watch together. Bernice is a cross between a mother figure and a buddy to her son-in-law. She prods Alex to find a more satisfying job and is disappointed in his attitude toward Janet. To Alex's bitter shock, Bernice has actually begun corresponding with Janet's mother.

When Bernice passes on to Alex the facts of Janet's life, Alex responds with sarcasm. Bernice shows him a photo of Janet with her family. Alex is conflicted. He is strangely fascinated by the thought that Isabel's heart beats in the chest of this red-haired mother of two. He is also defensive when Bernice tells him that Janet has to take a regimen of medications in order to tolerate her new heart. As if anything could be wrong with Isabel's heart! As Bernice longs to somehow even remotely link her life with that of the woman who lives because Isabel died, Alex fights any suggestion that he should also connect with Janet.

Janet tells her story in alternating chapters. She has been liberated from her old heart into a new perspective of the world as a glimmering adventure, filled with beauty and sensations. Yet her new condition is fragile, and she must work to maintain it.

As these characters' stories entwine, along with that of the person who drove the car that killed her, the reverberations of Isabel's generosity spread like ripples of a rock tossed into a lake. This story about a woman's gift of a heart will break readers' hearts. It is full of yearning, expressed in a wonderfully understated way. In addition, the characters are sympathetic and the plot's tempo is beat-perfect. IRREPLACEABLE is a must read.

--- Reviewed by Terry Miller Shannon (terryms2001@yahoo.com)

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