Heart Bones

Book reviews

19 Aug

Written By Anzhelika Li

“Don’t worry. Hearts don’t have bones. They can’t actually break.”

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1. HEART BONES by Colleen Hoover

SYNOPSIS

Life and a dismal last name are the only two things Beyah’s parents ever gave her. After carving her path all on her own, Beyah is well on her way to bigger and better things, thanks to no one but herself.

With only two short months separating her from the future she’s built and the past she desperately wants to leave behind, an unexpected death leaves Beyah with no place to go during the interim. Forced to reach out to her last resort, Beyah has to spend the remainder of her summer on a peninsula in Texas with a father she barely knows.

Beyah’s plan is to keep her head down and let the summer slip by seamlessly, but her new neighbor Samson throws a wrench in that plan.

Samson and Beyah have nothing in common on the surface. She comes from a life of poverty and neglect; he comes from a family of wealth and privilege. But one thing they do have in common is that they’re both drawn to sad things. Which means they’re drawn to each other. With an almost immediate connection too intense for them to continue denying, Beyah and Samson agree to stay in the shallow end of a summer fling. What Beyah doesn’t realize is that a rip current is coming, and it’s about to drag her heart out to sea.

BOOK REVIEW

Colleen Hoover never fails to amaze me with her bottomless talent and some sort of inner feeling of what particular words to use in order to twist the insides of the readers in the best way possible. Heart Bones was yet another masterpiece by the author. Heart-breakingly beautiful. Incredibly poignant. Unbelievably uplifting.

“It’s the luck of the draw, I guess. Most kids get the kind of parents that’ll be missed after they die. The rest of us get the kind of parents who make better parents after they’re dead. The nicest thing my mother has ever done for me is die.”

Beyah as barely a young woman had already gone through so much shit that my heart hurt so fucking much. I admired her strength and resilience despite her obviously broken state. She never had the luxury of the presence of a dependable family member and thus, was never given any different option but to fend for herself in order to survive. For me personally, my relationship with my mother has always had an immense influence on my life and a direct correlation with my happiness. And that’s the reason why I felt so bad for Beyah’s poor luck… It’s not a secret that Colleen’s characters are a bit broken or damaged one way or another, but it was really difficult for me to witness the girl’s struggles because of her rubbish excuse of a mother. I couldn’t help but pray for a better life for Beyah, which she definitely deserved after everything she had to go through. And I didn’t even blame her for lying on a constant basis and staying stand-offish. It was understandable to say the least.

“Sometimes I believe personalities are shaped more by damage than kindness. Kindness doesn’t sink as deep into your skin as the damage does. The damage stains your soul so bad, you can’t scrub it off. It stays there forever, and I feel like people can see all my damage just by looking at me. Things.”

Have you ever heard of how damaged people see their alikes from afar? Samson was the male version of Beyah of some sort but with minor differences. The boy was quiet and brooding. He stayed a complete mystery for me up until almost the very end, which I enjoyed greatly.

“I don’t understand humans sometimes. I hate it, because I find myself wishing that the entirety of humanity would suffer just a tiny amount more than they do. Maybe if everyone tasted a bit of what that dog has lived through, they would be more hesitant to be assholes.”

Since the entire story was from Beyah’s POV, I kept discovering many interesting things about Samson at the same time Beyah did. The foreshadowing made it a little bit less exciting to read the book because about half-way through you can kind of tell what’s about to happen in the end… I hate to spoil, but the core topics in Heart Bones were putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, understanding, forgiving, and giving a second chance…

“He might be right. Maybe we did grow heart bones. But what if the only way of knowing you grew a heart bone is by feeling the agony caused by the break?”

I absolutely loved Beyah and Samson together. I could easily tell that the two were destined to meet one another and stay together in order to love and support, projecting two main things that were never there in their lives when they needed them the most. If you’re primarily here for smut, the book might not be for you. But the chemistry between the main characters and their bond overall were to die for.

Heart Bones was fast-paced and the plot had a great flow. The novel broke my heart bones on so many occasions that I just stopped caring and restraining myself and shed a couple of tears once or maybe twice. The writing was unsurprisingly impeccable because… Colleen Hoover, c’mon. Not to drag this thing further, I recommend every single soul to read this amazing book!

“Love is a lot like water.
It can be calm. Raging. Threatening. Soothing.
Water will be many things, but even in all its forms, it will always be water.
You are my water.
I think I might be yours, too.”