Heart Bones
Grade : C

In the opening scene of Heart Bones - one of Colleen Hoover’s earlier and remarkably messy novels - recent high school graduate, the amazingly-named Beyah Grim, realizes that her mother Janean has died of a drug overdose while sitting in the living room of their Kentucky trailer while staring at a hated portrait of Mother Teresa.

“The bitch was a fraud” – the mother of Our Heroine on Mother Teresa.

Beyah’s initial reaction is to vomit even though Janean, who, as an alcoholic and drug addict, spent days doing all those classic clichéd Drunk Mom things characters do in books, like neglecting her daughter and being hateful. Beyah has been brought up in abject poverty and has gone without food many a night. Unfortunately, she’s only nineteen, which means she’s too young to rent another one when she’s thrown out due to rent arrears. Naturally, the portrait of Mother Teresa is one of the few things she takes with her when she leaves.

Beyah has vowed she won’t go out the same way as Janean. With a full ride volleyball scholarship to Penn State in her back pocket, she’s about to get out of dodge for college, but that’s not for another couple of months, and her temporary homelessness means she’ll have to rely on her father, Brian, for a home until she can take off to college. Brian left Beyah’s mom when Beyah was two and Brian became a weekend dad. Although he tried to reach out, Beyah rebuffed and avoided him, allowing him to fade out of her life for reasons that never really make sense, and hse doesn’t tell him about Janean’s death, for reasons that make even less sense. Brian is well-off and now married to Alana, who has a twenty-year-old daughter named Sara. Beyah has not met either of them, but heads to Texas to live with them anyway.

There, she learns about Samson, the best friend of Sara’s boyfriend, the boy next door – and finds him staring at her across the distance from his home. He is mysterious, possibly untrustworthy and headed to join the Air Force at the end of the summer. But he’s very handsome. Cue jellyfish stings, dogs named Pepper Jack Cheese, and skeletons of old friends being given an unofficial burial at sea. Can their love outlast Samson’s big secret?

It’s CoHo; you know something WTF-flavored is ahead of you. Spitfire girl meets tragic bad boy rife with secrets; childhood scars; ridiculous meet cute; ludicrously purple sex; ridiculous third act plot twist; obsessive love affairs, etc. One senses that Colleen Hoover sometimes writes things simply because she read a book in which they occur and thought it was a cool idea, not because she has a good sense of dramatic timing.

Beyah is a mixed bag. She starts out all hard edges but is softened into mush by heavy applications of stereotypical fluffy touches. Her most credible relationship is with Sara, who comes off as a nice, if naïve, person. But Beyah’s choices don’t make a lot of sense, especially avoiding telling her father the truth about her mother’s death, especially when they’ve bonded (her father generally acts like she’s five years younger than she is). It doesn’t help that Beyah is the one who rejected spending time with Brian, presuming he should just automatically know or want to know about her life and trusting her addict mother to provoke his curiosity. And no, she does not train nor act like an athlete whose college education depends upon her training for a collegiate level volleyball team’s success.

Samson is sad eyed and stalkerish, like a less dangerous Edward Cullen, appearing on Beyah’s balcony to surprise her and talking melodramatically of his attachment to the sea. The romance is a little insta-lusty, but they come off as credibly young and foolish. To be honest, the level of the romance, even with their similar backgrounds and scars, doesn’t feel like it…well, you’ll see.

The writing style is very classically mid-level CoHo. There are some good observations made about the poverty that Beyah has grown up in compared to the luxury that Sara has experienced together with poetry written by an adult that reads like it was spat out by a middle schooler.

Unfortunately, books I read in middle school still stick with me and are more readily read by me than Heart Bones. But if you’re into CoHo’s kind of melodrama, you might like this one better than I did.

Reviewed by Lisa Fernandes
Grade : C

Sensuality: Warm

Review Date : February 10, 2023

Publication Date: 10/2022

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Lisa Fernandes

Lisa Fernandes is a writer, reviewer and recapper who lives somewhere on the East Coast. Formerly employed by Firefox.org and Next Projection, she also currently contributes to Women Write About Comics. Read her blog at http://thatbouviergirl.blogspot.com/, follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/thatbouviergirl or contribute to her Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/MissyvsEvilDead or her Ko-Fi at ko-fi.com/missmelbouvier
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