OK so the next book I agreed to review was actually a group
of short stories called HEART, followed by an extract of a novel “How to get
your heart broken”, both by writer Rose Fall.
I was initially sceptical about the whole short story
concept, because I don’t think I’ve read a collection of short stories since I
was a child (even though I write them all the time) but I ended
You have to be prepared for it to just completely leave you
on a cliff hanger, and I think for some people this is hard. But by the second
story I was really getting into it - it allows you to see one moment, or a few,
from these character’s lives instead of having to digest an entire novel. One
story includes a university student with a passion for writing, who instead of
listening in lectures writes about her main character, Mia – I have been working
on a novel for the past five years and one of my main characters is called Mia,
so I could definitely relate. They are all
written in a way that a chick flick or rom com novel would be written which
shouldn’t be deep, but I felt these “deepness” manage to seep through somehow,
and I marvelled at it.
There are typos in all of the stories, which did bother me a
little, because that is perhaps the first rule of writing – always check your
work (or perhaps the second, with the first being write something worth
reading, which Fall has accomplished.) But even this has a slight charm, as
though you have stumbled across Fall’s secret collection of scrawled down
stories which she never meant for anyone to read. My favourite was when one of
the characters “hoped” off the pavement – I mean I presume he hopped, but who
knows?
Each story is accompanied by a song, with the idea being
that you listen to the song whilst reading the story. I was not organised
enough to sync myself up the music and the writing simultaneously, as I often
read on the train, but the idea is there, and I think personally
that it is a good one. Music makes the mood. I also greatly enjoyed the
personal bit from Fall herself at the end of the stories – I related to this as
well, and I would compare her sense of occasional hopelessness to what I convey
in some of my own stuff – www.therantyshorts.blogspot.co.uk
.
The novel extract included seems fun and I got pretty hooked. It starts with a girl who gets her heart broken by
her boyfriend Ryan at the start of the summer, and her friend, along with
another, more reluctant friend, sets out on a mission to cheer her up and to get
revenge on all of mankind. They conclude that they will all compete to try and
make the tanned, muscular, cocky boy who lives next door to fall in love with
them – and you can just see that this is going to end in complete disaster. It
reminded me of the film John Tucker Must Die, if anyone has seen that – it
seems to be that kind of idea, and as that is a great film, I think “How to get
your heart broken” seems both funny and as thought provoking as the shorts!
