Unbreak My Heart

There is something awful about feeling guilty.. It eats you from the inside, it kills the joy, it leaves you empty, it sucks the life out of you. The thing is, it doesn’t matter if you’ve made a big mistake or a small one, because your conscience will act like a magnifying glass making your memories haunt you day and night.

“My mind is not a very forgiving place.”

Also, being young is difficult; it’s hard to know what’s right or wrong, and it’s even harder to manage to walk that thin line between the two of them. You do some thinks that you wouldn’t normally do, and I am not making excuses for you, i am just stating the obvious.
And Clem is like this. She is young and naive and she falls in love for the very first time and she doesn’t stop for a moment to think about it. Because you don’t really think about love (do you?), you just feel it, and when the feeling is new you don’t know what to do with it. It comes out of nowhere and it leaves you breathless (and maybe a bit brainless) and even when the rational part of you screams that something is off you keep going with the flow.

This is what this story is about: making mistakes and living with the consequences – Clem fell for (no other than) her best friend’s boyfriend and the guilt is too much for her.

Did she feel like this while letting it all happen? Yes, a bit, but probably not enough..

So what’s her worse regret: that she had a secret or that the secret got out and she was left alone in the cold?
(I am not criticizing here either, we all do this, it’s part of who we are even though it doesn’t sound so well on screen.. does it?)

Sarcasm aside, the truth is that I really cared for Clem. I noticed how she thought that she and Ethan could have been perfect together; how he made her feel alive; how they shared the same interests; how they became closer and closer and she got more and more confused, trapped between her friendship with Amanda and her growing feelings for Ethan.
She didn’t take enough time to think that he might not be that perfect if he was flirting with his girlfriend’s best friend (duh!). I think that young love is blind like that.. You might feel the need to be loved, to find your ‘prince on a white horse’ and you forget what’s really important to you. Someone gives you a smile, holds your hand, makes a joke and steals your heart..
The question is.. Is it worth it, could you make it work somehow?
I am asking this because if you have any doubts (and you might have some) it might not be worth losing your friends for just a dream.

But Clem is young, she has a lot to learn, and making mistakes is only human if in the end it makes you a better person – and i think that she became one.
I understand why she was so angry. It was frustrating what happened with Ethan and the fact that she let it happen (show

). It was frustrating not to find some free time just for herself to cry her eyes out, but life doesn’t stay on hold, so she had to keep moving on, she had to find other reasons to smile, to forget, to forgive herself and to start over.

Another thing that I liked about this story was how the family got involved – as a side note, that little sister was an adorable smartass.
Back to the point, when you are young (and not only then) you try to keep your family at a distance, you are annoyed when they try to help you, but deep inside you might be just grateful that you still have someone to count on, to talk to, to give you advices, to make you smile again, to give you a hug, to say how important you are, how all the good things about you might define you better than your mistakes (I loved those lists in this book and I think that we should all do some lists with all the reasons why we care about our loved ones.. Maybe this way we would appreciate them a lot more).

Somehow I think that I am making the story sound too emotional and I shouldn’t because there were some cute moments as well.  I loved Clem’s memories with her friends, some family scenes, her sarcasm and outbursts (yeah, some of you found them a bit annoying, I found them to be realistic and this way I had a stronger connection with Clem) and even though I wasn’t crazy about her new relationship with James, he was such a sweetheart with his optimism and his wide smile (not to mention his drawings) and they shared some cute moments as well.. and the good thing is that their more-than-friendship helped them both in a way or another.

Now.. I gave it 4 stars because I thought there was a bit (too much?) of an unnecessary drama.
It’s what they call in Spanish ‘una tormenta en un vaso de agua’ (translation: a storm in a glass of water)… I knew somehow the storyline from the synopsis, but I kept looking for the big secret, big mistake, big wolf and even though what Clem did was quite wrong, I couldn’t stop thinking: ‘oh, come ooon, this is why you are ruining a potentially great summer?’
Also I wanted Ethan’s version. He seemed sincere at some point, they started so well that it really hurt to know that their ‘love’ story was about to hit a dead end (I am stupid like this because I liked him at the beginning, even though I could never appreciate a guy that keeps flirting with his girlfriend’s best friend – and I could write a whole book about this, so I won’t even start talking about this subject), so I still wonder why show

?
And then, the ending.. It’s just too open for my taste, or maybe just too abrupt. It happens quite a lot for me to feel the need to read one more chapter, and here I needed it so badly – one more page, one more paragraph… just a few more words?

All in one, this was a great story that made me think a lot and I hope that you will enjoy it as well.

Happy midnight reading!