Sixteen-year-old physics nerd Aysel is obsessed with planning her own death. With a mother who can barely look at her without wincing, classmates who whisper behind her back, and a father whose violent crime rocked her small town, Aysel is ready to turn her potential energy into nothingness. She teams up with her "Suicide Partner", Roman, and together they secretly plan their joint-suicide.
My Heart and Other Black Holes contains examples of:
- Abusive Parent: Aysel's dad is implied to be one of these
- All of the Other Reindeer: Aysel is isolated at school, her classmates shunning she was "that girl", the daughter of the man who killed Timothy Jackson.
- Character Development: Almost all of the characters get some of this, but it is most obvious in both Aysel and Roman. Aysel starts out as a depressed girl who wants to die because she thinks she'll become a murderer like her father. Everyone else shuns her and judges her based off her father, which doesn't help much. Over the course of the book, she begins to notice the good things and the happy things that life has to offer and manages to break free of both her past and her fear of taking after her father. She values life and starts trying to fix the broken relationship she's had with her mother for the past three years. Roman starts similar to Asyle. He hates life and hates himself. He is living with the guilt of being responsible for his little sister's death. He is planning to die the same way she did (drowning) on the anniversary of her death (April 7th). He begins, over the course of the story, to value his life more and live more and live for other people. All this happened because they fell in love.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Aysel's father killed the town's Olympics-bound athlete. Roman neglected his sister which resulted in her death.
- Driven to Suicide: The main focus of the book. Aysel thinks about it and plans it with Roman, but ends up deciding she wants to live more. Roman, on the other hand tries to kill himself by inhaling the exhaust from the car, but ends up being saved by Aysel.
- Gallows Humor: Quite a bit of it, all from Aysel. Roman is constantly chastising her for it. It never quite gets to the point of Black Comedy, but comes close.
- Internalized Categorism: Aysel has classified herself as a murderer-to-be, which is her reason for killing herself.
- It's All My Fault: Roman feels this way about his sister's death. Partially true, seeing as how he was busy having sex with his girlfriend instead of watching over his sister like his mother had told him to.
- Mood Whiplash: Oh so much. The book can go from unbearably funny to downright dark and depressing then right back to comedy again in the span of a just a few pages.
- No Sympathy: Aysel's classmates feel absolutely no sympathy towards her and don't try to help her; instead they shun her. This is also partially Aysel's fault, since she pushed away the only friend who tried to stick with her after all her other friends abandoned her.
- Only Known by Their Nickname: Aysel is constantly calling Roman by his screen-name "Frozen Robot", despite his constantly telling her not to.
- The Quiet One: Aysel never speaks up in class (or anywhere else for that matter) unless a teacher calls on her, which rarely happens.
- The Reveal: Two Big Reveals; one when Roman tells Aysel he was responsible for his sister's death, and another one when Aysel reveals the whole story behind what her dad did. We got hints, but up until that point we never got any details.
