Breakaway Books

Authored by Yulin Kuang; Published February 2024; Romance

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️

From just about the first page of How to End a Love Story, I felt deeply connected with the heroine, Helen. The responsibility she feels for taking care of others’ feelings, the discomfort she feels at never quite fitting in with the groups around her—the way that the author captures these feelings is so authentic. It grabbed my heart from the jump.

The story follows Helen, a successful author who manages to talk her way into the screenwriters’ room for the TV adaptation of her books. But in that room is Grant, the man who ran over her sister in high school in a car accident engineered as a type of suicide. Grant struggles with guilt and panic attacks over the accident, and I appreciated this realistic look at the long-term effects of trauma, when other novels could have brushed it aside.

Helen and Grant’s romance is anything but simple, considering their history and the anger Helen’s parents feel toward Grant. But throughout the novel, Helen’s and Grant’s complex feelings leap off the page as their attraction grows, described with the utmost empathy and creativity. And, of course, the description of their workplace romance is relatively steamy. Certainly not the spiciest book I’ve read this year, but a nice medium amount of heat.

Like many romances that I love, the book is not just about Helen and Grant’s relationship, but about Helen and her journey to healing, to learning to grieve her sister, to be the person she wants to be in spite of what her parents think. I will never stop loving romances that leave each individual character better than the way they started. 

I loved the glimpse into a Hollywood writing room and the hints of glamor that came along with it. While the novel deals with the serious subjects of mental illness and suicide, it still managed to tell a beautiful and charming love story. I can’t recommend this one enough!