Changes

|summary=Heavy drinking, philandering Patrick receives a teenager's heart: how will this change him? An elegant, thought-provoking look at the root of identity. Highly recommended and a lot better readthan read than I've made it seem!

If Patrick had something of a back story, then Drew's life had not been a completely blank or clean canvas. The family history went back to the Littleport riots (caused by high unemployment and rising grain prices) of 1816 and one of Drew's ancestors was hanged as a result - and his son imprisoned. There's a neat echo down the ages here as Drew's father died only recently of a heart attack, soon after being made redundant - and Drew has been permanently excluded from school. It should never have happened, but a newspaper linked Drew's death and the transplant - and Patrick became intensely curious about the teeenager teenager and his history.

As he recovered he pieced together the story of his heart and found a strange sensation developing - that his old life ''won't have him''. The heart has attained near-mythical status when considering the root of human identity and it would have been easy to turn this into a story of how an aging ageing roué achieved redemption when he received a fresh young heart. But Jill Dawson has given the story a great deal more depth and it pushed my mind into corners long unvisited as I considered what makes a person ''them''. It's a deceptively short and simple read, with a compulsion to keep reading just a little more, but there's a tremendous depth of knowledge behind the story - delving, as it does, into science, education, history and - most strikingly - what it means to live in the Fens.