A Well-Tempered Heart

September 30, 2013
An American tourist’s second trip to her ancestral homeland in search of guidance falls flat in Sendker’s follow-up to The Art of Hearing Heartbeats. At first, Julia Win believes the voice in her head is just a symptom of the stress built up from her high-pressure job and recent breakup. But when Western medicine fails to give her relief, an old monk at a yoga retreat suggests the pleas come from an unhappy Burmese soul inhabiting her body. Returning to Burma, Julia enlists U Ba, the half-brother she hasn’t seen in 10 years, to put the unhappy soul to rest. It turns out to belong to a woman who tried to protect her sons from a raging civil war in the country, only to be forced into a terrible choice. The bloody horror of her ordeal opens readers’ eyes to a history of buried atrocities, but the premise for Julia’s visit is tenuous, and its resolution has little to do with her original problem. Sendker takes pains to develop a realistic world, only to offer Burmese characters who speak almost exclusively in aphorisms (“Whoever forgives is a prisoner no more”), coming across less as flesh-and-blood people than as mystical guideposts for the heroine.

Cassandra Campbell is an experienced narrator, and her skills are put to good use in this sequel to THE ART OF HEARING HEARTBEATS. She vividly brings the passion, confusion, and other emotions of the protagonist to the listener. Campbell shifts capably between the contemporary female character and the backstory of war in Burma in the early twentieth century. As a female narrator, she manages equally well between the angst of the female characters and the modulated tones of the males. Her greatest strength may be that she avoids the hysterical pitch sometimes used to dramatize stories about women. Campbell's performance is easy on the ears; her pace and diction will be much appreciated by those who love audio versions of literary titles. M.R. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine