Beating Heart Baby, a story in two halves

 

So, today I’m talking about Beating Heart Baby by Lio Min, a book that I didn’t know existed until I saw it in the Big Gay Bookshop in Affleck’s in Manchester. It’s one of those I just saw it and was like, “Work, I’ll read that”.

The blurb says that Santi has had his heart broken only one time, and it was all his fault. When he accidentally leaked his internet best friend Memo’s song and it became an overnight hit, Memo disappeared. Three years later, Santi arrives in LA with a mission: get over the ghost of Memo. Thankfully, his new school and its Sunshower marching band welcome him with open arms. All except for the prickly, proud musical prodigy Suwa. But when Santi takes his identity in stride, both boys begin to let their guards down. Santi learns Suwa’s surliness masks a painful history of his own, and as they open up, their friendship quickly takes on the red-hot blush of a mutual crush. Just as Santi is feeling settled in this new life, he begins to put together pieces of an impossible truth – that he knows more and less of Suwa’s story than he’s been told. Their fresh start threatens to rip apart at the seams when Suwa is offered the chance to step into the spotlight he’s always denied himself. Now, Santi and Suwa must finally reckon with their dreams, their pasts, and their futures – together or apart.

The baseline from that massive blurb on the dust cover was that Suwa was Memo. That’s what I presumed before I started reading. I get that on a paperback book you tend not to get as much space for a blurb (my copy is hardback for context lol) so with hardbacks I feel like more gets given away, and to me, this kind of gave away that Suwa is Memo without saying it.

We open on Santi in a car in LA and he hears this singer called Cola Carter’s new song “Exit Music”, and he mentions how it’s impossible for him not to hear his old friend, Memo, because it was their song. Santi has just gotten to LA with Aya, who isn’t is mother, but essentially serves the mother role in his life, but Santi mentions how LA somehow feels familiar, since Memo is there. Still, he’s going to this new high school and their band camp with his trumpet. He runs into these two students, Mira and Octavian – I love Animal Crossing – and they immediately adopt him. He then meets Suwa in a bathroom, and Suwa is immediately this frosty guy who doesn’t think Santi belongs there.

Something I noticed in the first few chapters was just how fast it felt like things were moving. Like, the Sunshowers marching band had their first competition, that Santi was a part of, by the end of the third chapter. Meanwhile in that time, Santi helps Suwa through a panic attack and then by the fourth chapter, they seem to start warming up to each other. But Suwa was frosty towards Santi because Suwa is trans and in his words, he thought Santi had “clocked” him. And speaking on the pace of this book, it felt like I was reading a drama series. I’m not sure how else to describe it. I think it was Santi who said that he watches a lot of k-dramas, or maybe it was the author’s influence who might be a fan of drama series, and maybe that influence leaked into the book. But to honest, as someone who also watches a lot of drama series, I don’t personally mind, because I’m used to the format.

You do actually get to see how Suwa/Memo’s song got leaked in the first place. Memo shares “Exit Music” with Santi, and while Santi never actually shares it, you see that Aya ends up accidentally playing it for one of her co-workers – because Aya works in the music industry – and they end up giving it to Cola Carter. Although, I’m not 100% how that works, because they know it was Memo that made the song, so, unless Suwa/Memo approved the cover or use of the song, the music people must have just stolen it. I might have missed something when I was reading, but Suwa/Memo could have just said no to the use of the song, and then he could have gone about his life the way he wanted, since that seemed to be how he went about his career. Dropping off the face of the planet, that I still do understand, because from his point of view, for anyone to have even approached him in the first place, in his eyes, Santi would have had to have leaked it. Although, now I’ve written that, perhaps he was thinking that since the song had already gotten out, it was no longer serving the purpose it was meant to, because you do find out that Suwa/Memo made “Exit Music” for Santi specifically in the first place.

The book is actually split into two halves and POVs, which I didn’t actually see coming. The first half is Santi’s POV, the coming to the new school, being introduced to Suwa and his group of friends and becoming integrated into them. Then the second hops over to Suwa’s POV where he has moved to Tokyo with his sister, Sayo, after his blow-up with Santi. You know, it was that bad that he had to literally go to another continent. But he’s trying to be a musician in Tokyo when Cola Carter comes to him and offers him the chance of a lifetime, but it means he has to come back to LA and risk seeing Santi.

A perfect comparison I can make to this book is a Thai BL series, Theory of Love. It follows the exact format of this book, by which I mean the first half follows one character, then the second half follows another. Theory of Love follows Third for the first half, who is in love with Khai but by the end of Third’s half of the show he’s essentially given up and decided to get over Khai. Then that’s the point when Khai realises he likes Third, so then it flips over to Khai’s POV, because then the show becomes about him. That’s how this book worked. The first half was more about Santi fitting in and realising he’s found Suwa/Memo. Then the second half is about Suwa fixing everything.

Now to dramatically shift gears again, both Santi and Suwa are massive weeb, geek losers. And I mean that affectionately. You know, they’re kind of perfect for each other? Suwa does tell Santi at one point that he feels like he can be more himself around Santi than the rest of his friends, because Santi reminds him of Sayo. The two of them were very much the get very close very fast kind of pair that you sometimes see in romance. My big thought was that because Suwa was Memo, and they had been best friends before, whether they realised it or not, they were just slipping back into what they had before. I also really appreciated how you learned so much about Suwa through Santi’s POV, like, you get to see the places he works out of school, and why he works there. One of the jobs he does, he literally got from being a clean freak and organising shelves in this shop without anyone asking him to.

There’s a point towards the end of the book where Sayo literally asks Suwa if he’s on his own side, which was kind of the perfect question for him I feel. You saw it more in his POV than Santi’s, but that was kind of the journey that he went on throughout the book. It was like he was so used to building everything on his own, the idea of other people opening a door for him felt like a foreign concept, so he’d often shut the doors that people were opening, and then towards the end, you got to see what happened when he accepted that other people had good intentions for him and how he’d let himself through the doors.

Now, I don’t have some clever way to end this post other than saying I really liked this book. I think the first half felt more like a typical romance/first love kind of book and then the second half massively shifted. What a closer, you’re welcome. I’d say read it.

Okay, bye!