Hi friends, happy Wednesday, I hope you’re all doing well! Today I’m posting my review of Kami Garcia’s novel, Broken Beautiful Hearts.

Broken Beautiful Hearts by: Kamia Garcia: After receiving the best news of her life, acceptance to her top school to play soccer, Peyton can’t wait to share it with her best friend and boyfriend, only nothing goes to plan. Instead, Peyton finds out her boyfriend has been using performance enhancing drugs and when confronted, things turn from bad to worst and she finds herself at the bottom of a flight of stairs with a busted knee. Knowing full well she was pushed, yet no one believes her. When she can’t take the looks, bullying and death threats any longer she packs up for Black Water, Texas to live with her uncle for a few months. It’s there that she begins to find herself and the person she wants to be. This novel didn’t start off great; the reader wanted to rate this two stars because there were quite a few things that bothered them, but as we got to the end, it really did redeem itself and the resolution was really good, so it got a three stars. The good thing about this was that it was fast-paced so the reader found they were flying through the story quite quickly so it never felt like a drag to read. The plot of this was well done, it was heavy and dealt with domestic abuse, drug abuse and gas lighting just as main trigger warnings. The way Garcia was able to weave the really heavy stuff with the lighter and fluffy plots was well done. What the reader didn’t exactly care for was making the other main character have this life altering disease; it made it feel like it was added for shock value and the way that we found out didn’t help that claim. There’s all this build up to what is wrong with this guy, and because we already knew our main character, Peyton’s ex-boyfriend was abusive, it gave the impression that this new one was too and it just didn’t sit right with the reader. They also took a long time to warm up to the majority of the main characters. Peyton felt like she didn’t need any help from no one and that made it really hard for the reader to enjoy reading from her because it was so frustrating; the reader understands she has been through trauma, but she didn’t have to go through life without help. Then we have Owen, the new love interest; the reader felt the chemistry and thought they were great together, but the fact that he wouldn’t leave it alone every time Peyton said she wanted to be just friends. The insistent need to know why he couldn’t be more than ‘just friends’ with her all the time really got to the reader because she shouldn’t have to explain herself, especially since she just got to that town and school; like who are you to demand answers? Then we have her twin cousins who had to fight it out over everything. As soon as one of them got into a disagreement with someone, or even with each other, their fits were out. The angst in this was hella strong, which had the reader kinda taken out of the story a lot. Like it was mentioned at the top, the end turned around, once people started using their words and communicating better, all of those characters learned valuable lessons that in the end shaped them. It just sucks that it took almost four hundred pages to get there, so that’s why this reader didn’t completely dislike this. There were important talks that happened and important topics that this brought up, which would be great for teens. Overall, this reader might not be the target audience, but they can see how it would be good for teens.