DNF: The Tell-Tale Heart by Jill Dawson

The Tell-Tale Heart
written by Jill Dawson
published by Harper Perennial

find it here: (affiliate links) Barnes & Noble, Amazon, iBooks, Book Depository, Goodreads

Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book in exchange  for an honest review.

Where I stopped reading: page 56 of 242

Why I stopped reading: I could not get invested in this story. I wanted to, but it just wasn’t happening. I didn’t like the first main character, Patrick. He wasn’t likeable or sympathetic. He just had open-heart surgery, and I didn’t care. In part two, we are introduced to Willie Beamiss. I didn’t like his narration. I understand that he was uneducated, illiterate, but it was difficult to read his language. I understand that the author was writing in his voice, but I just couldn’t read it. I’m sure this book will appeal to many, but it just didn’t appeal to me. 
What others have rated this book: According to Goodreads, the average rating for The Tell-Tale Heart is 3.46. It looks like a majority of readers gave this book 4 stars. There were 3 4-star reviews on Amazon. At Barnes & Noble, the majority of the reviews were 3 stars. Just because I didn’t finish this book doesn’t mean you won’t.

About the book – from Goodreads: After years of excessive drink and sex, Patrick has suffered a massive heart attack. Although he’s only fifty, he’s got just months to live. But a tragic accident involving a teenager and a motorcycle gives the university professor a second chance. He receives the boy’s heart in a transplant, and by this miracle of science, two strangers are forever linked.

Though Patrick’s body accepts his new heart, his old life seems to reject him. Bored by the things that once enticed him, he begins to look for meaning in his experience. Discovering that his donor was a local boy named Drew Beamish, he becomes intensely curious about Drew’s life and the influences that shaped him–from the eighteenth-century ancestor involved in a labor riot to the bleak beauty of the Cambridgeshire countryside in which he was raised. Patrick longs to know the story of this heart that is now his own.

In this intriguing and deeply absorbing story, Jill Dawson weaves together the lives and loves of three vibrant characters connected by fate to explore questions of life after death, the nature of the soul, the unseen forces that connect us, and the symbolic power of the heart.