This book was unfortunately just ok. I wasn’t raving about it but I’m not here to put it down either. It was a right in the middle of road type of book for me.

I genuinely struggled to get through this one. I liked that it was set in college, so I had high hopes, but was severely let down.

While this book had a cute sounding plot and storyline, it just was not it for me. I tried to maintain the mindset that I was reading YA and not adult romance, but I found the main character to be needy and a little obsessive? It was a little too slow and repetitive for me - not enough to make me DNF, but not a storyline that kept me engaged either.

Listen I love YA books. I really do. They're just so cute, like the best of rom-coms packaged into a little book. However, I cannot deal with a whiney main character. That's exactly what Lu was. I wish I could say the writing made up for it, but sometimes an annoying character is too much. She's a teenager, I get it! She's growing up, sure. But no, sorry. No.

Brief Chronicle of Another Stupid Heartbreak by Adi Alsaid was interesting enough while I was reading but ultimately mostly forgettable and a skim read most of it. I do want to this this another try when I'm not in a reading slump though, as it seemed really cute.

Brief Chronicle of Another Stupid Heartbreak by Adi Alsaid follows teen love columnist Lu. She has been dumped by her boyfriend the summer after senior year of high school. This event has caused writer’s block, so she is unable to come up with a topic for her column. If she doesn’t write something soon, she will lose her gig and the college scholarship that comes with it. Lu’s best friend Pete suggests she write about her own pain. Lu has a different idea when she overhears a couple planning on breaking up for the same reason she was dumped. She becomes fixated on this couple and believes they are the cure to her writer’s block. When she meets the couple, Cal and Iris, she learns that they have postponed their breakup until the end of summer. Lu feels they’ve prolonged the inevitable pain of their future breakup. But she also wonders if the secret to getting over love lies with them.

This is a thought-provoking novel about the meaning of love, and the pain of love being over.

I desperately wanted to love this one. In fact, I tried to force myself for about half of it to believe I did until I finally gave in and faced the truth. This book is just ok. The plot itself isn't bad, but the characters are all tropes and the main character unlikeable.

Unfortunately my Amazon account got hacked numerous times and I closed my account. When closing the account, I lost all of my electronic kindle ARCs from netgalley under that email including this title which I am unable to review

I received an e-arc of this book through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

3/5 stars

So first I'm going to call myself out for not reading this one sooner. I've had this book sitting on my tbr for a couple years now and was so excited to read it when it came out but for some reason I put it off. I'm slightly curious if I would've enjoyed this more had I read it when I originally got it when I mostly read YA and only just started picking up adult romance books. That's not to say I didn't enjoy it but I've been finding it harder to give more than 4 stars to YA lately though I've definitely still given out 5 stars to some.

I feel like I started off this book enjoying it decently and being upset that I had put this off for so long only to have me feel over our main character and everything going on around 50%. Our main character ended up being obsessed with this other couple and seemed to forget about her own friends even though they tried to help her. And I just didn't feel really connected to any of the characters. Overall while I enjoyed the story enough I also feel that it will be pretty forgettable and will not be one I feel the need to come back to.

This book was... fine? The whole idea of eavesdropping on a couple and then following them for a whole summer is just a bit odd and the way the characters spoke was very incongruent with their age. I think overall, it was a fine story but tried too hard.

The first 200 pages of this book:

Lu: I'm going to do this thing.
Pete: That's a bad idea, here's why, and you're going to regret it later.
Lu: I'm still going to do this thing.

The last 120 pages of this book: I'll take plots that could be completely resolved by polyamory for $400, Alex.

After really enjoying North of Happy, I really wanted to love this, but I very much didn't. It was just so obvious that everything was going to go badly in entirely preventable ways. It was engaging enough that I didn't DNF it, but that's about all I can say for it. There are multiple books that I've enjoyed much more that explore the idea of "just because love ended doesn't mean it wasn't love."

The main premise of this story (interviewing couples heading off to college about whether they would remain together or not, and why) was interesting enough. There’s a lot of promise in delving in to relationships to see how they tick and what might have gone wrong. However, the book dragged and repeated itself a LOT. Very little happened to progress the plot or help me get invested. The main character, Lu, is struggling to understand why her boyfriend dumped her, and is simultaneously attempting to right an article about a couple, Cal and Iris, who have decided to stay together for the summer, but break up at the end. Lu was insufferable and boring. Her inner dialog was very repetitive and whiny. I found her problems to be self-created and avoidable, so almost impossible to care about. Cal was the most compelling character in the story, and there was not enough of him. I found it very difficult to buy in to his relationship with Iris. It was described, repeatedly, as this special thing but it didn’t land that way. The interactions with Lu and Iris didn’t feel natural or especially believable either. So much of this story feels forced. I wasn’t sure who or what I was supposed to be rooting for, and It was very hard to root for Lu with her over abundance of self-sabotage. On the positive side, this story gives a great feel for what it might be like as a NYC teen, born and raised.

I will not be reviewing this book. though it caught my interest at the beginning, I think the timing is wrong in my reading it because I lost interest. instead of giving it a bad review, I would like to try again at a later time.

Ugggh, this book. In terms of writing style, it was well-written. In terms of characters, it was kind of a disaster. The secondary characters were all great, I didn't really have a problem with any of them. But the MC experienced no character growth and just made one terrible decision after another. She was incredibly selfish and a horrible friend and never learned from any of the things she did. I kept having to put the book down because I couldn't stand her anymore. The premise of the book was cool and interesting but I just couldn't get past the horrible main character.

This book was okay. I enjoyed the writing and the main character but wasn't a huge fan of the story. I do wish there was more character development throughout.

I did not enjoy this one, but I had a feeling a few of my students would love it and I was right. Though the main character got on my nerves, my ninth grade girls who like romantic novels had no criticism about anything in the novel.

For most of the book, I was wondering why no one called the cops on Lu. I mean, she was kind of being a creepy stalker. Her obsession with Cal and Iris started to make me uncomfortable. She didn’t even know these people, and they became her whole life.

I understand that she had just broken up with her boyfriend, that situation is a whole other issue, but it got to the point where she seemed incapable of functioning without Cal. She completely ignored real life, and started living this weird fantasy.

I don’t know, maybe someone who has gone though a really emotional break up can relate and won’t find everything as creepy as I did.

I struggled with this one. Lu seemed to have a really unhealthy coping mechanism that I’m not sure needs to be romanticized. Call me a cynic, but I wouldn’t read it again. Adi Alsaid did a good job of creating a main character, she just ended up with a personality I didn’t like.

I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Author: Adi Alsaid
Publisher: Inkyard Press
Publication Date: 30 Apr 2019

This one was nice enough but not something I would brag about - sort of irritated me. I think a character who lets love destroy them & then focuses so much on it, just sort of irks me. Especially being so young. I do always love a good YA book though & this was OK enough to pass the time.

Thank you to Netgalley and Inkyard Press for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

This is the first book by Adi Alsaid, but I know it will not be my last. I was instantly pulled into Lu’s story and couldn’t wait to see what happened.

In the beginning, and throughout the whole book, really, I wanted this weird relationship with Lu and the couple she eavesdropped on – Cal and Iris. I wanted Lu and Iris to become bffs. They seemed to instantly click and they jsut had a nice flow to their friendship. However, Lu met Cal before she met Iris. He sat beside her on a bench where they talked in fake French accents and helped French tourists find their way. They seemed to have instant chemistry and I really wanted Cal to be the one to mend Lu’s heart.

For a while, this weird situation seemed to work. Lu started hanging out with Cal and Iris together, then separate. When she and Cal were together, it seemed like a romantic connection. When Lu and Iris were together, they seemed like they had been friends forever.
Lu had a best friend before all this went down – Pete. He might have been my favorite. He was asexual and Lu described him as her wise old uncle, which he thought was pretty fitting. He was funny and smart and gave the best advice.

Lu was eavesdropping on Cal and Iris because she writes a love column. Since her boyfriend broke up with her, she had writer’s block. She was listening to what she thought was their breakup for inspiration. This is really the central plot of the book – Lu working through her heartbreak so she can write again. Besides, her whole future lies in this column. She has to keep it to get her scholarship to go to NYU for journalism.

Brief Chronicle of Another Stupid Heartbreak was such a quick, fun read. It made me laugh out loud at times. It also took me back to my past days of high school romance when a break up was totally the end of the world.

I would recommend this book if you like YA romance contemporaries – but the ending will surprise you! I want to say more thoughts about the ending, but I’m scared it’s spoilery so I will refrain.

Brief Chronicle of Another Stupid Heartbreak was a heartfelt exploration of teen love and heartbreak. The main character, Lu, is dealing with a breakup brought on by the oncoming transition to college and through a chance encounter becomes attached to a couple who she believes embody true love. As she struggles with writer's block and wrestles with her own unresolved feelings with her ex, she questions the nature of love and whether teen love facing separation and the challenge of long distance relationships is fated for tragedy. Lu's struggles with writer's block was immensely relatable to me as someone who also writes, and the feeling that everything hinged on her ability to produce a piece also resonated with me. While I liked Lu's character and her sense of humor as well as the themes explored the book kind of dragged and didn't quite have the spark that would have made it more memorable and outstanding.