Chapter One Hundred Eight: La mécanique du coeur

I read La mécanique du coeur by Mathias Malzieu in its original French, and I'm not sure if there's an English translation widely available, so I won't make this a long post.  I was not a huge fan of this novel, at any rate.  While its premise is very interesting--a little orphan boy whose adoptive mother fits his defective heart with a clockwork prosthetic--the potentially cool steampunk atmosphere just falls back on typical tropes with a few distracting anachronisms.  (For example: the book is set in the late 1800s.  Why is the protagonist talking about airplanes?)  The protagonist himself, who narrates the story, veers between sympathetic and irritating as he finds himself bullied at school and obsesses about his love for a girl he saw one single time, singing on a sidewalk.  Still, despite the tropes and the narrator, I felt okay about the story right up until its end, which I did not like at all.  I won't reveal the ending in case any of my readers are planning on reading this story, but I found it totally unsatisfactory.  Still, it was great to read a book in French again; I haven't done that in a while, and it's good practice.