Irreplaceable

So, OK, I like to spout off about my home state of Iowa as much as I can. I like it here, it's a great place to live.
Thusly, we have some feathers in our cap here, one of them being the Iowa Writers' Workshop. It's pretty famous and stuff.

Remember the movie Juno? Diablo Cody dreamed about the Iowa Writers' Workshop and moved her keester to the U of I to get some schoolin'. And you writer/movie buff people might be interested in a slew of other success stories from the hallowed program.

Stephen Lovely, himself a resident of Iowa City and grad of the program offers us Irreplaceable as his first novel.

Set in Iowa and using his years of experience working at the University of Iowa hospitals, Lovely offers a heart-wrenching medical backdrop to his story about love and loss. Life and death. Sacrifice and personal discovery.

Irreplaceable begins with Isabel, the wife of Alex Voorman, tragically killed in a accident. Janet Corcoran is the woman suffering from heart disease who thinks she'll never get the heart transplant she needs to live. In the aftermath of Isabel's accident, Alex suddenly has a connection he doesn't want with a woman a state away. Irreplaceable follows their lives and how they are intertwined with each other.

For you movie goers, it may remind you a little bit of the movie "Return to Me". (Which I totally loved, loved, loved.) For you readers, there are some similarities in theme to best-selling author's novel "My Sister's Keeper". And to both, I do mean similarities but not duplicates. I would say, though, that if you enjoyed either of those I would highly recommend Lovely's book.

If you're just starting from scratch, I did quite enjoy Lovely's attention to character development and really exploring in detail the emotional journey the characters take in the story. He has taken something that seems so abstract to the rest of us who've never made a choice about organ donation and examined how it affects all parties. But in a way that pulls at the heart-strings...no pun intended.

I so enjoyed it I'm hoping to write the author and see if he'd like to talk about this book as a program at our local library. I'm hoping that as an Iowa author, he'll be interested!

Thank you to Parent Reviewers for sending the book, it was a very nice read.