(ARC) YA Book Review: The Secret Sisterhood of Hearbreakers by Lynn Weingarten

Release Date: 27 December 2011
Publisher: HarperTeen
Source: Around the World ARC Tours

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Goodreads description:

When her boyfriend breaks up with her on the first day of sophomore year, Lucy has no idea how she’s going to make it through homeroom, let alone the rest of her life. Enter three stunning girls with a magical offer Lucy can’t refuse. All she has to do is get a guy to fall in love with her in the next seven days, and then…break his heart and collect one of his brokenhearted tears. As the girls teach Lucy how to hook a guy (with the help of a little magic), she quickly discovers how far she is willing to go—and who she is willing to cross—to get what she wants.

My Thoughts...

The Secret Sisterhood of Heartbreakers was a surprisingly fun and moving story of a high school girl, romance, friendship, and magic.  Ms. Weingarten continually threw surprises my way and I found that I could NOT stop reading! It was one of those books that you pick up and all of the sudden, hours later, you find yourself turning the last page (and realizing that you're actually quite hungry...).

If there's an upside to having a broken heart, it's this: a broken heart makes you brave.

-p23, ARC

Lucy is a remarkably real young woman who I connected with over and over again throughout the book.  From the moment where she gets dumped, I felt a kinship with her.  Her pain felt so real and I think that it's the kind of first-love heartbreak that any girl can relate to on some level. When she's offered a chance at magic to help heal her heart forever, who could blame her for hoping to use it to get back the boy she loves?  The lessons that she learns along the way are priceless in every sense.

It's natural. Nature is dark and light, birth and death. Everything and its opposite. And in nature, there are predators and prey. The hunters and the hunted.  The heartbreakers and the heartbroken. The beautiful thing is that Nature lets us choose which we want to be. Most people never make the choice though because they don't even know they have it.

-p35, ARC

When Lucy meets the girls of the sisterhood, things really start to get going. The girls who recruit Lucy into their "sisterhood" took me on a roller coaster of emotions.  I would alternately love and hate them from page to page.  They really put Lucy through the ringer! Gil was my clear favorite, if for no other reason than she tried to really be there for Lucy throughout her tests.  Liza and Olivia were both incredibly intriguing characters throughout because you really felt like you were only getting surface glimpses of who they truly are.

The magical element of this story is incredibly well-done. The magic is a bigger part of the story than I expected but it flows into the storyline seamlessly. I also really liked how the magic was both readily and frequently used but it was balanced with the ideas of responsible and practical use. There were still points when I questioned how I personally felt about the ways that they used magic, but it didn't overall affect my enjoyment of the story. The magic combined with the budding friendships really help Lucy to grow-up throughout the book. I think I already said it, but I really enjoyed watching this process with her.  It was a joy.

The problem wasn't that she loved him too much; it was that she hadn't loved herself enough.

-p186, ARC

The Secret Sisterhood of Heartbreakers is a book that I truly enjoyed. The focus is on the sisterhood, not the ex-boyfriend or the friend-who-wants-more.  The ending was not at all what I was expecting when I started the book, and I liked that. It's always nice for a book to go for the slightly-less-predictable resolution.  I started thinking I knew how this book was going to "go" but I was wrong at so many turns.  Ms. Weingarten has written a wonderful book that I would definitely recommend to many readers of contemporary fantasy who lean more towards the contemporary (i.e. this is "fantasy-lite).