Reviewed by Lacey R.
Grade 11
Most people have a place they go when they need a break
from life, where they go for solitude, peace, or just to feel nothing. There
could be a certain room in one’s house, a diner, a park, or even the beach, but
for 17-year-old Reiko Smith-Mori, it is the California desert. Only Love Can Break Your Heart by Katherine Webber is a book filled with romance and
intrigue--the story of a girl who had it all: the looks, the grades, the
confidence, but all that changed when she lost her sister. She finds peace and
solitude in the desert, and unexpectedly, a boy. This book relays the ups and
downs of the pair’s relationship, if it could even call it that.
Reiko, is what one would call “an average teenage girl,” but she is
far from average. She struggles with maintaining her veil of perfection, which
can be depicted through her thoughts and sometimes extreme action. What those
around her don't see is that she is not well, she is grieving her sister's
loss, and moreover, repressing it. Someone stands in her way and isn't letting
her move on--her sister, Mika, who she still sees and talks to as if she has
not passed. Reiko, to escape the heartache of her sister, often escapes to the
desert to relax. One night when she wanders out to the desert, she runs into a
boy. They bond over a dreamlike moment of time, with the bright moon casting a
soft glow across the abyss and the serenity of the desert night. The next day she
sees him at school, and over time their relationship grows, until it doesn't.
They unexpectedly and slowly grow apart, both dealing with dramatic changes.
Reiko has to navigate her world of popularity contests, suppressed emotions and
grief, and now a rocky relationship that may have been doomed from the start.
The book has a
well-thought-out plot, yet character development would have made the read much
more enjoyable. The plot follows the main character and her struggle of losing
a loved one, with small scenes and short chapters, but the timeline becomes
confusing. The rapid pace only deterred the characterization. The
characterization, or lack thereof, seemingly changed the message of the book.
While the author is trying to show the negative effects of miscommunications,
there wasn't much communication between the writer and the audience. Emotions
were told directly through the internal dialogue of the main character instead
of actions or reactions.
The book was a quick read, and seemed as if it were a
quick write as well. There were chapters that did nothing for the plot, only
reiterated something that was already known, useless conversations between
characters, spontaneous trips that were only set up for later chapters to
reveal something unimportant. There were many clichés in the book, with lines
written in a way that it seems I have read them before, such as “You’re selfish and spoiled, and usually you
can get away with it, because you’re beautiful and charming,” which shows an
overplayed arc and cheap characterization that is directly revealed to the
audience.
Overall, if you
are looking for a quick read for a school project, this is it, but if you are
looking for a good book with a cute romance story, I would not recommend Only
Love Can Break Your Heart. It seems as if the book was
written in a short amount of time, with little attention to character
development, conflict, and plot. The moral was produced in a way that was
slightly insulting to the readers, such as a Disney movie about never judging a
book by its cover; this book’s moral is that you never know what is going on
with someone else and a lack of communication can be detrimental. The deeper
moral, that was scattered throughout the chapters with a repetitive trope and a
rocky relationship, was that to move past something, you must accept it first,
which is of course a good lesson to learn, but in this book it seemed cheap. A
book with a similar lesson would be The Boy in the Black Suit by Jason
Reynolds, which goes about accepting loss and love, in a more defined and
readable way.
