Thank you Walker Books for this book in exchange for an honest review

Synopsis:

Sometimes a broken heart is all you need to set you free… Reiko loves the endless sky and electric colours of the Californian desert. It is a refuge from an increasingly claustrophobic life of family pressures and her own secrets. Then she meets Seth, a boy who shares a love of the desert and her yearning for a different kind of life. But Reiko and Seth both want something the other can’t give them. As summer ends, things begin to fall apart. But the end of love can sometimes be the beginning of you…

Review:

Only Love Can Break Your Heart gave me mixed feelings. Real bad mixed feelings. There were parts of the book I loved and then there were a few bits and pieces that didn’t really fit the flow of the story or left the wrong image in my mind. I’ll get to the weird image in my mind situation in a second.

Reiko is a Japanese-American who is struggling to come to terms with her sister’s death and also battling the feelings of love. And for a teenager that is pretty much at critical stage – the world is so full on for teenagers that everything is dramatic. Well losing a sister is, I won’t deny that for a second but the whole love thing for teenagers is something I will never wrap my head around. Personally I feel like teenage love is over rated, all too common and pretty much the focus of most YA books these days. But I digress and I’m blabbering but I just can’t help myself.

Reiko is the only person in her family that can still see the ghost or lingering memory of her dead sister, I couldn’t decide on which it really was. Ghost? Memory? Don’t know but I love it either way. Reiko wisely keeps the fact she can still see her sister to herself, none of her friends or family are aware of the battle that is brewing and beating in Reiko’s mind. And while Reiko, who happens to be one of the most popular kids at school starts hanging out with Seth, a guy from a trailer, her feelings, emotions and everyday teenage issues begin to collide and explode. Figuratively speaking, she unfortunately doesn’t all of sudden self-combust, though that would be a great idea for a story!

What I like about the book? Honestly the whole torn relationship with her sister. Her greatest friend and ally, standing by in her house and watching Reiko live life without her and experience things that she will never have the chance to. As morbid as it is, I loved it and would have liked the book to focus more on Reiko dealing with the death of her sister more than the standard typical love thing.

Alight let’s talk about the love thing. I’m not a real lovey dovey kind of person in general, honestly I would have preferred if Reiko turned into a horror movie slasher and killed him, but again I’m morbid and moving away from the point. Overall their love or lust situation started off cute and I could see it going somewhere but the pace of their relationship was too slow for me and got really over bearing. The focus on their love outshined Reiko dealing with his sister’s death more than it needed too.

Remember how I spoke about something leaving a bad image in my mind? Well, when Reiko and Seth are hanging out and their relationship grows and what not, I came across sentences like ‘he lit up.’ ‘He glowed.’ ‘There was a glow behind his smile.’ After a few of those sentences, Seth then became a glow-worm in my mind. Imagine it, the popular girl at school making out with a glow worm. Kind ruins the romance right? I know it sounds crazy but every time there was a scene with Seth in it, I just had the image of a glow-worm in my mind. Crazy I know but he just glowed so much I couldn’t help myself.

Credit given where credit is due, Webber is a great writer. It might be due to the fact she has probably lived in the area of America where the book is based, but her descriptions of the location, really set it up in my mind. And the same goes with her characters, and she can really bring through their personality through their dialogue and gestures without having to describe her characters personality and traits.

Overall this book was okay. Like I said from the start I had real mixed feelings about the book. You have the intriguing death of her sister and how that plays on Reiko’s mind and a book that was written well. On the other hand there is a walking, talking glow worm that literally glowed his way through the book. And the love between Seth aka the glow worm and Reiko was a mood killer. If there was less love and more dealing with tragedy this book would have been fantastic, unfortunately it didn’t get there for me.

Rating: 3.5/4

Publisher: Walker Books

ISBN: 9781406369052