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The Heart Principle grabbed mine and didn’t let go

The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang

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Helen Hoang’s The Heart Principle was everything I wanted and more. Our heroine Anna Sun is going through it. She is a violinist stuck in a loop after a performance video goes viral on YouTube. With every practice session, she wants to replicate that moment with precision. She ends up burned out and unable to finish the song. She is attempting therapy to find a breakthrough. Later that day, her boyfriend asks to “see other people” as an excuse to know that he’s ready to […]

The Heart Principle

The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang

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Trigger warning: Suicide ideation What a lovely book. I have really enjoyed all of the books in this series, and this one is probably my favorite. I know that some readers were not happy with this because it was “too serious” and not a romantic comedy like they were expecting. But honestly, we get some very “fire” sex scenes, so I was fine with this book being more open about the main character’s Asperger’s diagnosis and the burnout that she was feeling and how dark […]

Not pure fluff, but very, very good.

The Heart Principle (The Kiss Quotient, #3) by Helen Hoang

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I liked the first two books in this series, but this one is on another level. It’s very personal and you can tell, even before you get to the end and the author’s note where she straight out says that the book is half memoir. With this book, she was Working Through Some Shit. However, just because you write what you know as an author doesn’t mean that you will write something good or compelling, but Hoang has definitely managed to do that, and I […]

“The only good thing this broken heart of mine can feel is love for you.”

The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang

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The Heart Principle was delayed a year while its author Helen Hoang dealt with some personal traumas which she goes into in depth in the Author’s Note. Many of those traumas feed directly into the re-worked plot of this book. I’m firmly in the camp that this is a romance, even if the romance plotline finds itself uncentered through sections of the work, but this is certainly not a rom-com style book as its cover would want you to believe – in fact I have […]

Conventional and Less Conventional

The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang

Bringing Down the Duke by Evie Dunmore

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I’m terrible at titles, but I did want to highlight what I saw as the main difference between these two romance novels (both of which I enjoyed). Bringing Down the Duke by Evie Dunmore is a pretty standard historical romance, set in late Victorian England (rather than the usual Regency period). The time period is important, as politics are central to Dunmore’s plot. Her heroine, Annabelle Archer, has seized the opportunity to escape domestic drudgery and enroll in Oxford, were she involves herself in the suffrage movement. […]

Sex lessons premise + multi-layered characters + an earnest HEA = a contemporary romance that gripped my heart

The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang

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I finally read The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang. I have to confess that I’m reading this loose series out of order. I reviewed The Bride Test last year, which made me cry it was so sweet. This year, I’m reviewing it for CBR12 bingo square with the “Cannonballer Says” square. Looking at the past reviews, nearly all my CBR romance peeps raved about it. And it did not disappoint! Stella Lane loves her job predicting customer behavior using complex math. In her personal life, […]



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