IJCS | Volume 33, Nº2, March / April 2020

186 book’s somewhat didactic approach, it can help students to realize the whole network of repercussions behind a patient who suffers a heart attack. In this case, an event in a young patient with a child. And this situation can bring consequences not only from the emotional point of view, but also from social and economic ones. This didactic approach becomes even more explicit when, at the end of the book, we find the information on how to prevent and how to treat a heart attack, and what is a defibrillator, for instance. Besides, there are moments of poetry in the daily process in which father and son (re) approach and how Joaquim “finds a way to his father’s heart,” which “returned to beat normally”. Hearts to millions presents the heart with more subtle and poetic metaphors and situations. From a duality between what a child feels about the heart and what his older brother thinks, we can discuss an (false?) opposition between art and science. At first, the older boy, under the influence of teachers and school, considers the heart only as a muscle “with auricles, ventricles and other complicated names”, the size of a closed hand and a constant heartbeat, even if varying with emotions. The younger boy asks: “If my heart is so small, how do so many things fit in it?”. The illustration of the book follows the text: on the one hand the small heart muscle inside a pot, ready to be studied in an anatomy class. On the other hand, hearts of varying sizes and colors in contact with nature and life. The younger boy has a richer vision - he notices the differences in heartbeats when he’s quiet: “when mom caresses my hair, my heart gets serene and beats slower”; he also starts to question the size of the heart: “sometimes I even think my heart is elastic. When I’m happy it gets huge, when I’m sad it seems to shrink and gets so tiny the size of a point.” Some of everyday metaphors are translated by a child’s innocence to: “... I’m suspicious that my aunt has a heart that is a safe as he heard his mother on the phone telling his aunt that she had to open her heart. The boy thought “my aunt locked her heart in such a way that she can’t open it now. Poor thing... this must cause her affliction.” And he also hears that the girl who works at the bakery has a “butter heart” and that “anyone who has heard of butter hearts has certainly heard of stone hearts.” And the young boy sadly notes: “I try to explain these things to my brother, that the heart is not only a muscle, but he does not understand... Does he not understand that a heart has so much to tell!... of one thing I’m sure: there are no two hearts alike!”. And he decides that “... if his heart is a muscle, my heart, that beats like a drum, is a box where I keep the things I feel every day!” And even a child realizes that “things can be joyful and sad at the same time and hearts canmix everything and disorganize them like dressing drawers.” In the third book, The man’s heart of popp , a pop-up book of incredible beauty, the boy José Francisco says that his father was a good man and a “carpenter, although he would like to be a fisherman, as he felt tightly held by the waves”. But...”my father was born with a weak heart... the days passed and he did not improve, he was weaker andweaker.”His father missed people but “people didn’t greet him anymore, because he wouldn’t get out of bed. The heartbeat cluttered like a moth closed in a jar looking for the air.” But the father was good with his hands and thought of “building a poplar heart to replace his, that was faltering.” The doctor called him crazy because this had never been tempted. But the father, “slowly, not to get tired, carved a wooden heart.” The poplar’s heart had “small roots coming out of it, resembling small veins and arteries”. The doctor still found it a silly idea but “had no choice than to try the risky operation” because the father’s heart stoppedworking for amoment. The doctor, in despair, had no other choice, and it was not a surprise, “the operation was a success!”. “His life resumed, he returned to work in carpentry, and dream of the sea... that was when he met my mother and fell in love.” But, with time, his mother realized his father was changing, roots started to grow from his feet and one morning, his father “left home to walk in the woods and never came back.” This story was told by a boy who did not Figure 1 - Book cover "The man with the poplar heart" - authorized by author Marco Taylor. Mallet et al. A different heart in children`s literature Int J Cardiovasc Sci. 2020; 33(2):185-187 Viewpoint