Jar of Hearts

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness and death, graphic violence, physical abuse, emotional abuse, child abuse, child death, and rape.

The book’s title alludes to a Mason jar that Calvin fills with cinnamon heart candies and gives to Geo. This jar comes to symbolize several things. Calvin gives it to her as an apology after the first time he hits her. The fact that he fills it with a candy he loves and she doesn’t demonstrates the selfish nature of his feelings for her and his efforts to impose his own desires and needs onto her, developing the theme of Manipulation and Control in Abusive Relationships. Calvin believes he loves Geo, but his abusive treatment qualifies that love as distorted and deceptive. The jar of cinnamon hearts, like the heart that Calvin tattoos on his wrist with Geo’s initials or the heart he draws on his note to Geo in the courtroom, symbolizes the false love that embroils Geo in an abusive relationship and murder.

For her part, Geo accepts Calvin’s gift of heart candies “because she [thinks] the bright red hearts inside the glass look[] pretty” (136). The hearts represent Geo’s naive sense of what love is.