Product Description

Cameron is thirteen and in need of a heart transplant when a pioneering doctor approaches his family with a startling proposal. He can give Cameron a new heart - but from a pig. I Cameron is fed up with just sitting on the side of life, always watching and never doing. He has to try - to become the world's first pig-heart boy.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6702 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Malorie Blackman's brand of weighty, topical novels has proved immensely popular and won her several top book prizes, including the Smarties and Young Telegraph book awards (the latter twice). Her reputation as one of the best and most prolific children's authors writing today is founded on her intelligent handling of contemporary issues of interest and concern to children--Hacker, Thief! and A.N.T.I.D.O.T.E, her first three novels, dealt with time travel and computer hacking.

Pig-Heart Boy picks up another topical issue, that of xenografts or animal organ transplants. Cameron Kelsey has only a few months to live, and is no longer able to play sport, swim or live a normal life in any way. With no suitable human heart donor available, he agrees to try the revolutionary new process and is given a new heart, from a pig.

Through his tribulations he learns about the meaning of friendship, and how much he loves life and doesn't want to let go. This is a cracking read. Malorie Blackman has a particular skill of getting inside the mind of a thirteen year old. Highly recommended. (Ages 8 to 12)

About the Author
I am drowning in this roaring silence. I am drowning. I'm going to die . . . Cameron is thirteen and desperately in need of a heart transplant when a pioneering doctor approaches his family with a startling proposal. He can give Cameron a new heart - but not one from a human, one from a pig. It's never been done before. It's experimental, risky and very controversial. But Cameron is fed up with just sitting on the side of life, always watching and never doing. He has to try - to become the world's first pig-heart boy.

Customer Reviews

great idea, grippingly told
Cameron is a boy who loves sport, but a virus has left his heart weak. Increasingly unable to do the things he loves, and with a new baby in the family on the way, he must have a heart transplant. No human donor is available, so he has the choice of having a ground-breaking operation: a pig's heart will replace his own. It may sound weirdly like something out of Snow White, but the operation works, at first, and suddenly he's able to live a normal life again.
Then his best friend's father tells a newspaper, and Cameron has the horror of living with tabloid journalists calling him Pig Heart Boy. How a brave but normal kid copes with this, the possibility of dying and losing his best friend Marlon is described in very readable, fast-paced prose.
My 10 year old daughter read this recently as a class text. It's a terrifically good book, and one of the things we both like about it is that it describes the life of a black family without any of the usual politically correct stuff you so often get. Cameron is just a kid, one whom you get to know and care about a lot. In a quiet way, Blackman is a real revolutionary for insisting on this.
I also thoroughly recommend Blackman's 'Noughts & Crosses' for older readers of 12+ as a brilliant SF novel about a world in which black people rule and white people are the underdogs.

Fantastic and throught-provoking
This is such a great book by Malorie Blackman. It's throught-provoking and intelligent and made me wonder how I'd feel if I were in Cameron's shoes and needed an organ transplant. I don't think this book was slow or dull at all - quite the opposite. It didn't have car chases and explosions but so what. It was still an excellent read and is a story just crying out for a sequel. It was a book that must've had super-glue on the pages because I just couldn't put it down - which has been the case with practically every Malorie Blackman book I've read, but especailly with Noughts and Crosses (the best book in the world), Knife Edge (the 2nd best book in the world) and Thief! (the 3rd best book in the world).

Discusses the pros and cons of animal organ transplants without sugar coating it
Cameron has a credible voice, helped by the use of the first person and Blackman perfectly captures the envy he feels for his healthy friends. Cameron knows that there's little chance of a donor becoming available to replace his heart so when his father tells him that he's contacted Dr Bryce, a former heart surgeon who's currently working on engineering pigs for organ donation, you understand why Cameron wants to go for it. Cameron's parents voice the pros and cons of such an experimental operation but Blackman also shows how Cameron's condition has taken a toll on the parents' marriage.

Blackman gets across the science of using animal organs for human donation and sets up the ethical issues. She doesn't shy away from the actions of animal rights extremists and she uses the hyperbole of the media reaction to feed into those attitudes. My favourite scenes in the book are those between Cameron and Julie after the operation where Blackman highlights the changes in both characters as a result of the procedure.

I was less convinced by the relationship between Marlon and Cameron, mainly because I didn't quite buy into Cameron's willingness to forgive Marlon's actions (no matter how understandable those were) - but again, it's a good way of showing how the procedure changed things for Cameron, things that he wasn't really prepared for.

Blackman's decision not to sugar coat her book extends to the ending - she leaves it pretty open and yet the reader is in no doubt as to what Cameron's fate will be.

The scenes with the grandmother didn't work for me and seemed far too artificial a device for what Blackman wanted to achieve and I wasn't wild about the baby element, but it did give Blackman the chance to have Cameron monologue his inner-feelings about events, which worked for me in terms of fleshing out his character.