Book Review :: Only Love Can Break Your Heart by Katherine Webber

Only Love Can Break Your Heart by Katherine Webber
ISBN: 1406369055
Published by Walker Books Australia
on 2018-08-02
Genres: Contemporary, Romance, Young Adult
Pages: 385
Source: Walker Books AUS
Find at Walker Books AUS
Goodreads

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...

Last updated on 18 April 2023

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What is Only Love Can Break Your Heart by Katherine Webber about?

Seventeen-year-old Reiko a beautiful, popular, straight-A student who everyone loves or wants to be. But she has a secret. She can still see her sister Mika, who died several years ago. Most nights are spent with Mika, chatting about life and school and boys, watching the sunrise together. But then one day when Reiko is out in her favourite place – the Californian desert, climbing boulders and watching the night sky – when she meets Seth, a boy in one of her classes at school, to whom she’s never paid much attention to.

As their friendship grows, Reiko sees less of Mika, less of her best friend, and more of Seth and the desert stretching out before them. The whole summer is spent in the desert with Seth, but when school begins again in the fall, for the last time, something shifts; things aren’t like they were over summer, and Reiko doesn’t like it. Something isn’t right.

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My thoughts on Only Love Can Break Your Heart

This was a sweet story about loss and love, friendship and families, grief and joy; it was everything you would expect from a young adult contemporary novel. Overall, I did enjoy the story, but like most books, there were aspects which fell a bit short for me.

Reiko was … punch-able. Harsh, but true. While I understood that her way of grieving was putting up this ridiculous facade of “I’m okay” and “I’m fine” and acting like everything is normal, but she treated her friends badly, she used Seth to feel something good, she didn’t talk to her family about Mika (granted, neither did they), she missed important events, she was catty and snobby at times, and reckless, too. Seth wasn’t much better. I didn’t love any of the characters (although Reiko’s little brother Koji was pretty great, and Reiko’s best friend Andrea ‘Dre’ seemed like the only semi-sane one at their school), so the book lost a few stars for that.

I did enjoy the plot though, the setting and the themes. Reiko’s dad is Japanese, her mum is American, so there’s a beautiful cultural thread running through the story from her father’s side of the family, and Japan always hovering in the background. The Palm Springs desert setting was brilliant, and I really like the idea of just heading off into the sand and seeing what there is to find. Adventures at midnight are my kind of adventures, and Reiko and Seth take a lot of them.

Desert wanderings, crazy old artist ladies, high school dramas and a secret fill the pages of this book, and while it wasn’t a 5-star book for me, it might be for you. Let me know what you think if you read it!

If you’ve already read Only Love Can Break Your Heart by Katherine Webber, what did you think? 

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I received this book for free from Walker Books AUS in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.