In Every Heartbeat by Kim Vogel Sawyer is about three friends from the same orphanage awarded a scholarship to college just before WWI.

Libby wants to be a famous journalist. She’s not tomboyish exactly, but she gets along with boys better than girls and isn’t interested in the same things as her high-society roommate, Alice-Marie.

Pete is called to preach, and though he is the most spiritually mature of the three, he harbors resentment towards his parents because their sending him to work as a child resulted in an accident and the loss of his leg. His parents are the only ones living (as far as we know), and he thinks if he can just find them and get his feelings off his chest, he will relieve that burden from his mind.

Bennett is the most jovial of the three, always ready to jump into a good fight, and avidly searches for significance. He thinks he’ll find it by joining the most prestigious fraternity on campus, but makes an enemy on campus the first day who stands in his way.

As the back of the book says, “the friends’ differing aspirations and opinions begin to divide them.” I like the way the author detailed the flaws and problems of each character and wove them together. Each faces a crisis of some sort and learns and grows along the way.

One of the most important aspects of the book in my opinion comes up in Libby’s story. (Mild spoiler ahead.) She tries to find work at a newspaper but is told by one editor to come back later when she’s gotten through college and had some experience. She discovers in the meantime that she can write fiction for a women’s romance magazine to earn money and gain experience. From what I can tell it’s not lurid romance, but it does focus more on the physical. At the same time, Pete has to come up with a class project that involves “taking on” a problem of the day and finding a way to combat it and stand up for truth. When he sees some girls giggling over such a magazine as the one Libby writes for, he decides to take on that kind of titillating romance story and writes a letter to the editor in protest, unaware that his friend, Libby, is writing that kind of story.

In the course of the book, Libby has to come to terms with her writing (I’ll let you discover how in the book so as not to spill too much of the plot here 🙂 ), and the difference between a romance that titillates and a romance that reflects Christ’s love for his people is made pretty clear, in my opinion. Yet as I looked through some of the reviews on Amazon, I was very surprised that a number of reviewers there didn’t understand what the author was doing and made comments like, “Why is she criticizing romance novels when she’s writing one?” I wouldn’t classify this book as primarily a romance novel, though it has romance in it (that’s the type of book I prefer. I don’t usually go for books that are just “handsome boy meets beautiful girl and falls in love,” end of story.) But I have also seen good people sweep all romance novels, Christian or not, under the rug as portraying relationships in an unhealthy way. There certainly are those types of romances, even in Christian fiction, and we need to be careful that we’re not reading things that will either accent the physical or portray a hero and heroine  and relationship so perfect and unreal that we can never be satisfied with real life. But a romance that portrays flawed characters who find each other and find grace to overcome obstacles and love each other despite their flaws as Christ loved the church, with a love that wants the best for the other even at the cost of sacrifice to oneself — that’s pretty realistic to me, and I don’t see anything wrong with that. In fact, I think that can encourage the right kind of romance. And I think that’s what Libby discovers, too.

As I got into this book, I began to think some of the characters sounded a little familiar, and I realized they were from another of Kim’s books, My Heart Remembers. I had read that a few months ago and thought I had reviewed it, but I hadn’t. In Every Heartbeat reads fine without having to go back and pick up My Heart Remembers, but if you’ve read the first book you’ll enjoy the second, and if you’ve read the second you might enjoy going back to see where some of the characters came from.

I enjoy books that I get more out of as I think about them even days after finishing them, and this book is one of those.