Title: Break Your Heart

Author: Rhonda Helms

Genre: New Adult, Romance

Publishing Info: Comes out on July 28, 2015, published by Kensington Books

Number of pages: 240 pages

My rating: 1/5

I received  this book via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

It’s taken me about a week after I finished reading this book to actually sit down and formulate logical thoughts about the reasons why I didn’t like this book, because it really kills me to write negative reviews. I know authors put a lot of time and effort into creating their works, and who am I, a high school student with far too much to say for herself and  access to a computer, to judge their creation? So before I go any further, I don’t want anyone to think I am bashing this book: these are simply my opinions, and perhaps you will read this book and find that it was far better suited to your tastes then it was to mine.

New Adult isn’t a genre I typically read, but when I saw this book on Netgalley I was intrigued. Break Your Heart is about math major Megan Porter who is only one year away from graduating college when she meets the young, attractive Dr. Nick Muramoto, who just so happens to be her professor. Despite all the apparent obstacles keeping them apart, Megan and Nick start a relationship together, agreeing that they will keep it a secret until Megan graduates at the end of the school year. Despite the rather cheesy sounding overview, I was still interested and excited when I first began reading this e-galley.

I really wanted to like this book. I did, I really tried. In fact, there were a lot of aspects that, if done well, could’ve made this book stand out among the others in the New Adult category. Megan is an African-American woman pursuing a career in mathematics, a notoriously male-dominated field, while Nick is one of the youngest professors at the university as well as Japanese-American. The class Nick teaches is modern cryptography, and so the incorporation of codes into Nick and Megan’s secret relationship sounded extremely promising. On top of all that, Megan’s mother is suffering from an addiction to prescription pills stemming from a bad back injury, an addiction that could ruin the construction company Megan’s parents run together. Put this all together and you have a recipe for a really good, intriguing book, right? Wrong.

My first issue with the book was Megan, Break Your Heart‘s main character and the voice through which the whole novel is told. From the beginning I found Megan rather annoying. I like how Rhonda Helms tries to alter society’s stereotype of math majors by making her main character a pretty, young girl who likes to go out and let loose at parties rather than a stuffy old mathematician, however I didn’t like the execution of this particular approach. Megan never really seemed to have any interests outside of partying and flirting with apparently every guy on campus, which I found made her come off as superficial and unlikeable rather than creating a cool, spunky protagonist, which I think is what Helms was going for here.

Another problem I had with this book was that I thought the relationship between Nick and Megan began too quickly, which took a lot of the suspense out of the story line in my opinion. At first nothing happens between Nick and Megan other than a few steamy looks, but then all of a sudden Megan goes to a nightclub and Nick just so happens to be there and just so happens to be the only way she can get home and they just so happen to make out in the car. Then Megan feels ashamed about what’s happened, the two meet in Nick’s office, talk it out, and decide that what happened can’t happen again anytime soon and I thought it was going to take the two of them a good chunk of the book to actually get together and begin any sort of relationship. However, after what seems like only pages after Nick and Megan agreed they can’t have a relationship, they’re sending each other flirty emails and then all of a sudden they’re having coffee dates in the early hours of the morning. Perhaps some readers will enjoy that Nick and Megan get together so quickly and that most of the book revolves around the more normal, everyday details of their relationship, but I personally would have liked a bit more suspense and tension between these two characters.

Overall, this book just really wasn’t for me. All of the elements I mentioned earlier that could have made this book really interesting, such as cryptography and Megan’s mom prescription pill problem, were kind of brushed over and not developed as much as I would have liked. The writing style bothered me, and I thought the ending was rather cheesy and inconclusive. If you are a die-hard fan of New Adult and teacher-student romance stories then you might love this, but I was just left with an overall feeling of regret for a not-so-great book that could have been really, really great.