Publisher's Synopsis
In a world where emotions are dangerous, memory is fragile, and names are currency, a boy awakens to the quiet ache of forgetting-and the wild, relentless call to remember.
Elian was never meant to question.
Trained at the Academy of Stillness, taught to suppress his every feeling, and burdened with a locket that pulses but never speaks, he lives in a world that rewards silence and punishes sensitivity. Yet even within the cold stone halls and structured days, something inside him refuses to be buried. A flicker. A hum. A heartbeat out of rhythm with everything he has been told to believe.
When an unexpected break in his routine unlocks a forgotten thread of memory, Elian begins to unravel a past he never knew he'd lost. With the help of two unlikely companions-Mira, a sharp-edged fighter who guards more than secrets, and Dorian, a quiet soul who feels too deeply-he embarks on a journey across a land fractured by fear and magic long forbidden. What they discover is not just the truth behind their stolen emotions, but the names they once bore and the power they were taught to fear.
From haunted forests to ancient vaults, from shadowed towns to gardens blooming with memory, The Heart That Forgot to Feel unfolds as a lyrical and immersive odyssey of identity, grief, healing, and resistance. Each chapter leads Elian closer to himself-and to a past the world tried desperately to erase.
As the trio ventures deeper into lands of forgotten truths and buried names, they must confront not only the forces that sealed them, but the parts of themselves that once agreed to forget. Because reclaiming what was taken means facing what hurt most. And some memories were locked away for a reason.
Told in lush, metaphor-rich prose and structured in twenty evocative chapters, Evelyn Wren Carter's debut novel is both a fantasy epic and an emotional coming-of-age tale for readers aged 8 to 12-and anyone who has ever felt too much in a world that asked for less.
A story of found family, emotional courage, and the quiet revolution of reclaiming one's truth, The Heart That Forgot to Feel reminds us that healing is not the absence of pain, but the presence of what we were always meant to carry.
This is a book for the sensitive. For the strong. For the sealed and the broken-and for all those ready to remember who they really are.
