A Life Shaped by Secrets, Redeemed by Forgiveness

What the Heart Carries by Susan Appel

Susan Appel‘s debut novel, What the Heart Carries: One Secret, Two Lives, is intimate in scale and enormous in emotional reach, and written with the honesty of someone who has lived every word on the page.

A Love Story Rooted in Time and Place

The novel opens in Brooklyn in 1966, where we meet Cecilia Russo, a dutiful Italian-American daughter whose world pivots on a single afternoon when a dark-haired charmer named James catches her eye through a gym window. The courtship scenes are rendered with warmth and specificity — Coney Island boardwalks, the rumble of a ’65 Pontiac GTO, cotton candy and stolen glances — and Appel places us so firmly in mid-century Brooklyn that we can practically smell the baked ziti and broccoli rabe simmering on Cecilia’s mother’s stove. This is a writer who understands the texture of a world.

But What the Heart Carries is not simply a love story. It is a multi-generational reckoning with secrets: what they cost, who bears the weight of them and what happens when the silence finally breaks. Spanning more than four decades through its eighteen chapters, the novel follows the consequences of an unspoken choice Cecilia makes and traces that ripple across two parallel lives: Carmine, the son Cecilia kept, and Stephanie, the daughter she gave away. The two grow up in the same Bensonhurst neighborhood, attend the same high school, likely brush shoulders at any number of moments, never knowing what connects them.

Revelation and Redemption

Appel structures her narrative with control, weaving between time periods and perspectives without ever losing the emotional thread. Her prose is direct and unadorned, which suits the material perfectly. This is not a book that reaches for lyricism at the expense of truth. Instead, Appel writes the way a trusted friend speaks — plainly, with feeling, without artifice. When Stephanie finally receives the phone call from a private investigator asking whether she was ever told she was adopted, the scene lands with the quiet devastation of something long suspected but never said aloud.

The novel’s final scene, including Stephanie’s Easter Sunday testimony delivered in her own voice, is among the most memorable passages in the book. It is raw, grateful and spiritually grounded in a way that feels genuinely earned rather than imposed. Stephanie speaks of forgiveness — of her adoptive mother who kept the secret out of fear, of a biological mother who gave her up and never stopped regretting it, of a brother she found and lost within four short months. “Forgiveness is the most beautiful gift you can give — to yourself or to someone else,” she says, and after everything the reader has witnessed, it does not read as sentiment. It reads as hard-won truth.

What elevates this novel above a simple family drama is its generosity of spirit. Appel does not assign blame. She renders characters who are flawed and frightened and love imperfectly, which is to say, she renders people. The adoptive mother, the birth mother, the absent father, the devoted husband — each is afforded complexity, each given the dignity of their own interior life. And at the center of it all is the bond between Carmine and Stephanie, brief and blazing, two puzzle pieces that fit perfectly across decades.

Appel closes her author’s note with a line that lingers: “Silence is never the final word. Love is.” What the Heart Carries makes good on that promise with grace, courage and a storytelling voice that is unmistakably, movingly her own. For readers who have grappled with family secrets, grief, adoption or the complicated arithmetic of belonging, this novel will feel like recognition of the rarest kind.