What's a Heart List?
For as long as I've considered myself both an artist and a reader, I've had an intense fascination with fiction about art and artists. I'm hopelessly drawn to books with artists for main characters, regardless of genre or apparent quality. It's become a bit of an obsession. Recently, I've been rereading Kasie West's young adult novel "Love, Life, and the List", a book about a budding artist who, upon being rejected for an art show, becomes determined to bring more life and heart to her paintings. Our main character Abby embarks on an adventure to complete her "heart list", a bucket list of sorts inspired by the traits of the people she most admires in her life. It's a really fun book, a very sweet coming of age story framed through this process of artistic and self discovery. I'm coming back to this story 8 years after I first read it, and despite the fact that I'm no longer in its target audience, I've found myself connec...