Grant and Helen were well-drawn, believable characters on their own, but their connection wasn't realistic at all. The writers' room relationships and banter were the strongest parts, and Helen's grief was thoughtfully explored, but the romance was the weakest element.

I finished How to End a Love Story today. I could have finished it last night, but I wanted the story to keep going so I made myself stop to savor it. 5 stars for this debut from Yulin Kuang, who is actually a screenwriter herself (like her book's main characters) and is adapting some of Emily Henry's work for the big screen!

The book begins at the main character's sister's funeral. Warning that if you have lost someone in your life to suicide, this book deals with the fallout on a family from losing a child to suicide. Fast forward 13 years, and the main character is thrust into forced proximity (via work) with the very man who played an unwitting role in her sister's suicide.

I honestly loved the angst in this book - the slow build up to a relationship between the two main characters, and how we get to live in both of their heads. You root for them, but you also know nothing can happen long-term with them, because of who they are to each other. There was some gorgeous prose in this book as well - I found myself underlining lines more than usual when reading.

I will say I found the beginning of this book slow. It wasn't a must-pick-up-and-keep-reading for me until about 50% of the way through, when suddenly I couldn't put it down. However, the payoff was worth it! I'm looking forward to reading more from this author in the future. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC!

Yulin Kuang's How to End a Love Story is a gripping and emotional story of love, loss, and second chances. Helen Zhang and Grant Shepard, two writers with a complicated past, find themselves working together on a TV show, forcing them to confront their history and the feelings they thought they had buried. The writing is both sexy and emotional, drawing readers in with its raw and authentic portrayal of love and forgiveness. What sets this book apart is its depth of character development. Helen and Grant are flawed and complex, making their story all the more relatable and heart wrenching. As they navigate their past and present, the author delves into themes of forgiveness, redemption, and the power of love to heal old wounds.

Absolutely head over heels in love with this book. I want to crawl into bed and hug this book to my chest and cry and sleep for the next 6-8 months I loved it so much. Beautiful, wonderful, amazing. I can’t even try to consolidate all my feelings for it into a cohesive review. How can a book that had me weeping, wailing, sobbing one minute also have me panting and pacing my kitchen SCREAMING and sweating reading the smutty scenes in the next. The RANGE is unprecedented.
It is art. High art. I’m starting it again as we speak. Pressing play.

rating: 4 stars

this book is like sexy black lace and i couldn’t love it more.

the chemistry between helen & grant? totured, palpable, electric.

the writing? absolutely sublime. like SO well done. everything is done on purpose. yulin kuang shifts seamlessly from grant to helen and back again. i usually prefer 1st person POV but this book has me rethinking everything. probably one of the best 3rd person POV books i have ever read.

given this yulin is a screenwriter, this does kind of read like a movie in some parts and it made for such a vivid experience.

i wished i could reach through the page and hug these characters. some of the lines grant delivered? i was on. the. floor. don’t even get me started on the scene where he writes his address ON HER INNER THIGH. top 5 romance book scenes of all-time. i squeaked.

HIGHLY highly recommend everyone read this. be prepared to feel big feelings. this is not a light & fluffy book.

Really you would think Helen Zhang has it all. Writing a best seller, selling the rights to a TV adaptation for her book and getting to be in the writer's room to help craft her vision in this other medium. But back in high school her sister died by jumping in front of a car. A car driven by the prom king, Grant. And the same boy, now man, who is in the aforementioned writer's room. So many levels and undercurrents here. How her sister's death has closed her off emotionally. Dealing with her immigrant parents overall, but especially how none of them have moved on her the death. Oh yeah, and there's the love story and the connection between Helen and Grant. And the interesting details of the writer's room. A there's a lot going on in this book. And I really enjoyed it, but I didn't love it as I had hoped to do. And that's because I couldn't warm up to Helen. While her reactions are true and intrinsic to her character, she's so different me and my friends I could only react to her intellectually, not emotionally

I’m definitely on the unpopular opinion side of this! But just something about the plot made this book “meh” instead of memorable. The writing is so good though, like I definitely will read another book from this author for sure! But this plot was just…weird. The whole woman-falls-in-love with someone she shouldn’t thing is just so…not the target age of readers I would expect this book to be for? Idk it’s weird. That plus just a more unrealistic type of love story just had me not loving this as much as I thought I would!

This one absolutely blew me away. I heard about this book when Yulin was a guest on the Fated Mates Podcast and I was intrigued. And I was not disappointed. It had me absolutely sobbing at some parts (a sign of a good book for me), and then had me kicking my feet at other parts. I loved that the premise was messy and that the characters felt so real. I will definitely be thinking about this one for awhile.

How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kuang makes me feel confident in the upcoming Emily Henry movies. If Yulin Kuang can write this, they can do EmHen justice.

What a great read. I loved the characters, their backstory, their relationships with their parents, and their friends. Helen's insistence that their relationship was over, combined with the title of the book, made me think I wasn't going go get a happily-ever-after, but I'm glad I did. Thanks for sharing this book with me!

Unfortunately, this one was not for me. I found the alternating POVs a bit hard to follow and didn't love the whole romance rooted in trauma trope (if that even is one). It was also too insta-love for me, and I couldn't understand how the main characters fell in love.

Ok so back in 2018, I pitched a VERY similar book concept by the title of "This Is Where I Leave You" to agents in Dayton, OH. Weirdly enough, this book is pretty much the same concept, and the main character writes a story on it called "Here's Where I Leave You." I can't objectively review this because I am wracking my brain at how this could've happened coincidentally.

I've heard a lot about this book and it definitely did not disappoint! Helen and Grant were two dynamic and exciting characters. The dialogue was fun and flirty and never boring. The story itself was really interesting, I hadn't read a romance that handled complicated grief like this one did. I loved learning more about the screenwriting process, and about adapting books into shows (especially after learning that Yulin Kuang is adapting Emily Henry's books). There was so much to love about this book, it's kind of hard to articulate it. Both Grant and Helen's families felt like fully formed characters who weren't just there to move the plot along, which I feel like can sometimes happen in romances. I think it was really nice to see the differences between the families, especially since neither was 'typical'. It was enjoyable to see Grant and Helen go back to their hometown and interact with people from their high school. It made me nostalgic. Also, I'm from Westfield, New Jersey, so it was kind of neat to see it mentioned a few times. Thanks to Avon and NetGalley for this ARC!

this was a weird book.

it uses the word vague a lot, and it loves to murmur. it has a lot of italics, for no real discernible reason. there's a whole scene where it seems like it might be sponsored by scrivener?

more seriously, it creates a very troubled romance with very troubled characters and puts them in a love story it will take 300 pages to untangle into something resembling a happily ever after, except we never really get to their individual personal issues. helen never makes real friendships, and grant doesn't either. parental relationships are left unresolved. they get back together, but the why feels unsolved at best.

it also relies on chemistry instead of intimacy, with a lot more sex scenes than romantic ones.

but there were moments it was really yearn-y, and really promising. i'd probably read another book by this author.

I can see why Yulin Kuang was hired to adapt Emily Henry's books; both authors are adept at creating beautiful romances from honest, vulnerable portrayals of grief and trauma. Truthfully, I was less convinced by Helen and Grant's romance and insta-lust than I thought I'd be (though the forced proximity helps here), but their chemistry is visceral enough to make them intriguing. I also appreciated that both acknowledge the amount of healing they had to do from Michelle's suicide.

This one feels a bit difficult to review. It deals with a few heavy topics including but not limited to panic attacks, death of a loved one, suicide, and familial expectations. It didn't feel like a straightforward romance, but one that straddled the line of: romance and what might be categorized as general or woman's fiction.

I did enjoy this one overall. I liked how Grant and Helen slowly opened up to each other. Helen had good character growth which I appreciated, while I wanted a bit more from Grant. While this story is told in dual-points-of-view it definitely felt more like Helen's story as a whole and her journey.

I listened to a good portion of it on audiobook, and while I enjoyed the female narrator, I had a bit of trouble with the male narrator – but I am notoriously picky when it comes to narrators! It sounded to me like he was saying everything almost angrily, even when that wasn't Grant's mood or intention, so it threw me off. So I found I enjoyed Grant's POV sections much more when I was reading them rather than listening.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing what Yulin puts out next!

Absolutely adored this, no notes! I loved these characters and the depth this story had, while still being swoony and laced with emotion.

Absolutely fun, well-written, with plenty of angst and comedy. I love the characters and found them easily relatable. A great debut.

She only has this debut novel so far, but I'm decidedly going to buy anything Yulin Kuang writes! This was a smartly-written romance with authentic characters, gripping vulnerability, and spice spice spice! I love the Asian American representation, and I also love the family dynamics and overall introverted social doubts the heroine has. This will be a book I pull off my shelf to re-read. This isn't appropriate for a high school library (although no doubt teens and adults alike will devour this. 5 stars from this picky reader!

A heartfelt enemies to lovers romance book that is well-paced and multi-dimensional. Often, an issue I have with this particular trope is that the protagonists are enemies because of a trite misunderstanding or because they have highly competitive type A personalities. In contrast, the characters in this book have deeply personal issues with each other due to a past trauma involving their families. Each of the main characters, Helen and Grant, deals with the pain caused by this in their own unique way, which felt authentic and...kind of heartbreaking. They end up working together, in the writers room of the screen adaptation of a popular book series. It is easy to become wrapped up in their world and invested in their potential happily ever after. The author, Yulin Kang, is a screenwriter, so the dynamics within the writers room seemed genuine, and informative without over-explaining the particulars. I loved this "inside baseball" look at the writer's room, and despite some of the heavier aspects of this book, there is a lot of humor and levity sprinkled throughout. I loved this book and would definitely recommend it to fans of Emily Henry or Abby Jimenez.