Breakaway Books

Authored by Ova Ceren; Published August 2025; Romantasy

⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️

There are ways in which I am a true book snob. I don’t turn up my nose at any genre that’s not literary fiction, but when certain key elements of writing and plot construction fail, it affects my enjoyment of any book. The Book of Heartbreak was tough to enjoy for these reasons.

In The Book of Heartbreak, Sare is cursed: Should she suffer five heartbreaks before she turns eighteen, she will die. If she manages to avoid such a fate, she will lose her heart for good, out of the reach of the pain of love. Seventeen years and four heartbreaks after her birth, she is on her way to Istanbul following the death of her mother to live with her grandfather, the only family she has left. But when she meets Leon, a seer who seems just as tied up in the world of curses and ethereals as she is, her curiosity about the origin of the curse and her ability to break it is unleashed. Perhaps she doesn’t have to be resigned to a life without love after all.

In my opinion, what really makes or breaks a romance—or a romantasy, in this case—is the couple themselves. I will drag myself through extremely long novels if I am invested enough in the fate of the star-crossed lovers. Unfortunately, when it comes to Sare and Leon, I just couldn’t find any traits to root for at all. Who are these people? I know Sare has a sweet tooth, and Leon is hot, but as for who they actually are, I am in the dark. I need something to work with, something that makes the characters more than just vehicles for curses and blessings. Not caring about Sare and Leon made it really difficult for me to care about this novel. 

A compelling couple would have made it far easier for me to overlook the novel’s other failings. The pacing was not quite right, and I simply never felt all that curious about the origins of the curse or the way to end it. Each new discovery seems completely obvious or all the way out in left field. Not much is happening, and then everything is happening. The writing itself doesn’t help: The profanity is excessive, to the point where “fuck” loses all meaning. The author doesn’t show us the feelings of the characters but merely narrates them. And the strange correspondence among celestials stuck at the beginning of each chapter strikes an entirely different note tonally from the rest of the narrative, without paying off until the very end, and not satisfactorily at that. 

Despite everything I’ve just said, I do think there is a kernel of a good story in here. That’s what makes the rest of The Book of Heartbreak so frustrating.