Senior Morgan Frierson is at the top of the social heap at Edison High School. She's beautiful and popular, and she's the student council president. She's in love with Trent, captain of the football team, and they have their future all planned out. But everything changes in an instant on the day before Thanksgiving when a bomb goes off on the high school campus and nine students are killed, and dozens more are injured. Morgan is blinded. During her recovery, she learns devastating news, and is supported by the person she would never have imagined would be there for her. In a moment, Morgan's life changed forever, but through love and perseverance, she just might find meaning she never knew was there.

While the catalyst event in Red Heart Tattoo is shocking and tragic, the bombing itself is not the focus of the book--it is the backdrop to the developing relationship between two main characters, which plays out in the months both before and following the event. There are a few serious issues that are lightly explored--namely a teen pregnancy that caused a relationship to end, the deaths of two parents before the start of the story in a drug-related explosion, and the social exclusion that motivated the student bombers--making this book likely more suitable for a teen audience than the publisher's recommended age of twelve and up. The main teen relationships are fairly chaste, and limited to making out. The kids involved have made a conscious decision to hold off on taking things further, though they are clearly tempted to do otherwise. There is a surprising resolution to the relationship in this story, just in case the reader thinks there might be a predictable ending.

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