Cœur de slush

Cœur de slush is the title of Sarah-Maude Beauchesne’s first novel and the image that gives Billie’s first great summer its emotional shape. A blue raspberry slush is at once an ordinary treat, a recurring sensory reminder of Pierre, and a metaphor for his changeable inner life: Billie imagines him as having many hearts, including one that melts and chills her like the drink itself. The title gathers the book’s contrast between adolescent romantic intensity and the imperfect, sometimes uncomfortable reality of intimacy.

Title and Story

The title names the novel and anticipates its central love story. The book’s introductory description presents Billie falling headfirst for a prodigiously talented cyclist with conspicuously blond hair. Her first major summer of love will break her heart, though the hurt will not be unbearable. The story’s world is made of kisses on a water slide, root beer lip balm, ketchup-covered fries, and blue raspberry slush: small, vivid particulars through which adolescent desire acquires its own scale and drama. The novel’s tone is described as bright, naïve, often funny, and at times bittersweet, with seduction and Billie’s attempt to understand a fascinating but complicated boy at its center.

The title’s slush is not simply a summer prop. Its vivid color and taste turn an everyday purchase into a repeated point of contact between Billie’s physical present and her feelings for Pierre. The drink is refreshing and pleasurable, but its coldness also suggests the discomfort that accompanies desire. That doubleness makes it an apt emblem for a romance that feels exhilarating without becoming a simple fulfillment of fantasy.

Blue Slush and Billie’s Desire

The image first belongs to a larger wish for transformation and rescue. At seventeen, Billie wants to become a girl-woman—not fully an adult, but something beyond the girl she associates with private-school uniforms and skirts shortened with craft scissors. She imagines changing her hair, darkening her nails, speaking more slowly, choosing her words, and appearing more assured. Her longing to be caught in a fall by a boy’s arms belongs to the same wish: she wants to be seen and wanted, and hopes that the summer might supply the magic she feels has been missing.

When Billie later wants a slush, she specifies that it should be blue. The choice is concrete and playful: the heat makes the blue color on her tongue amusing. Yet the scene also places her appetite amid self-consciousness about her body and romantic expectations. Walking barefoot to the convenience store three blocks away, she is reading Jardin; the book’s words intensify her heat and thirst, while her dress clings to her thighs in the still air. The blue drink therefore enters a summer already charged with reading, fantasy, bodily awareness, and a wish for an encounter.

The title’s emotional force depends on how the ordinary sensation returns. After a painful episode with Pierre, Billie tries for seven days to forget the taste of his kisses, his voice, his eyes, his hair, and the details she resents about him. Each time she drinks slush, however, the memory comes back. The drink makes forgetting difficult not through argument but through sensation: its taste carries the romance back into the body even as Billie tries to reject Pierre in thought.

Pierre’s Many Hearts

Near the novel’s close, Billie describes Pierre as more than a handsome, accomplished boy who serves burgers, rides a bicycle, and appears in newspapers. She has encountered other attractive boys, but Pierre has managed to make her blush, imagine stars in her eyes, and feel more beautiful. Her portrait does not stop at his outward brightness. She pictures him as containing many hearts, with different shapes, decisions, and emotional temperatures—some gentle, some hard.

Those hearts are given specific tastes and textures. One is associated with sunscreen, another with the bottom of a beer glass, another with a sad song, and another with brasserie burgers. Billie has also glimpsed a vulnerable, exposed heart that might taste of calamine, as well as one that edges toward discomfort. The list refuses a single, stable definition of Pierre: he is assembled in her imagination from moments of tenderness, ordinary appetite, hardness, and unease. Her image of him is affectionate, but it also records the limits of what she understands.

The heart that seems to set the others beating is the blue raspberry slush heart. It melts repeatedly and chills Billie’s forehead; pleasure and discomfort arrive in the same image. The metaphor thus turns Pierre’s complexity into a sensation Billie can recognize, without making that complexity disappear. The slush heart is vivid because it is never wholly solid or settled: it melts even as it leaves a lasting impression.

Growing Up and the Image’s Meaning

Billie contrasts Pierre’s many hearts with her own two: one belonging to a girl, the other to a woman. They mingle against her will, and the mixture hurts. The contrast gives the title a coming-of-age dimension. The slush image is not only a figure for Pierre’s emotional multiplicity; set beside Billie’s two unsettled hearts, it belongs to a story about trying to inhabit a changing self while desire pulls her toward adulthood faster than certainty can follow.

That uncertainty becomes especially tangible when Billie considers sex. Annette bluntly recognizes that Billie is in love with Pierre and wants more than kissing, a possibility Billie denies. Later, Billie’s fear is specific rather than abstract: she worries about being sticky, about appearing ugly naked, about whether she should make sounds she does not want to make, and about the prospect of lying like a starfish in an unfamiliar bed. The fantasy of romance meets the facts of a body and a choice she does not feel ready to make. Her hesitation preserves the difference between wanting Pierre and consenting to a next step; the novel’s account of growing up does not treat the two as interchangeable.

The title’s bittersweetness comes from holding these experiences together. Slush is sweet, cold, and temporary; Pierre’s remembered taste returns after the relationship has hurt Billie, while the drink’s melting quality echoes how quickly a summer ideal can change. Yet the novel’s introduction insists that heartbreak will not hurt as much as it seems. Cœur de slush names the intensity without declaring it permanent: a first love can leave a sharp, recurring imprint and still be part of growing into oneself.