Heart To Heart: A Review

By:

Zahavah Melech

Blurb for Heart to Heart from Amazon.com

“When her immortal mom falls into a death-like sleep, 16-year-old up-and-coming pop star Angelica Brown is forced to come of age on her own without the support and protection of her powerful parents.”

In this sequel to Blood To Blood, Angel has mastered her epic singing voice—a virtual weapon with the power to literally kill every living thing and destroy any object within earshot. Still, as a newly matured Shimshana, she suffers an all-consuming blood lust and wrestles daily with urges to attack the mortals around her. She breaks up with her boyfriend—18-year-old music producer Sawyer Creed—and loses the nurturing friendship of her BFFs. But after an unexpected reunion with her immortal blood donor Justin McCarthy, their previously shelved passion is re-ignited—and in the wake of its scorching intensity Angel breaks the love triangle and finally discovers the depths of true love.

When I received Heart to Heart to review and I scanned the blurb for the novel, I have to admit I at first was a bit skeptical of how this novel would turn out. I thought, okay another teen vampire book like I hadn’t read that a million times. I am sad to say that I was right to be skeptical as the book turned out to be a big letdown. One thing this book featured that I personally hadn’t read earlier was an interracial romance and an assortment of brown characters. I’m always excited to read and view content that has diversity and characters that I can personally relate to. However those aspects were the only good thing I found in the novel.

The plot wasn’t outstandingly original. Since the smashing success of the Twilight Franchise, the teen vampire in love with the mortal has been a very popular storyline in Young Adult Fiction. It seemed the author spent more time putting detail into explaining to us the past or rather introducing a character’s back-story, than she did speaking about the present. I do enjoy a good back-story, but when an author starts to over explain minor things I begin to wonder if I’m just reading filler pages.

The main character, Angelica Brown, known by her friends and family as Angel, is one of the most boring teenagers I have read in a young adult novel this year. The author has Angel make plenty of unnecessary choices. Angel could very well be Bella Swan’s long lost sister; it is hard to not establish a comparison between the two as they are cut from the same cloth. There were plenty of moments in the novel when I wanted to jump into the book and shake her silly.

Often time’s authors get wrapped up in producing the perfect girl next door female character, Ife Oshun is not among those writers. Angel is flawed and she knows it and embraces it the best way that a 16 year old can. She is not an all knowing force and I wouldn’t expect her to be, however I wish she made smarter choices. With the little chances we get to see her family members, they outshine her at every point in the book when they do make an appearance, their back-stories and abilities seem as they could have given a much more interesting story.

The relationship between Angel and Sawyer could be summed up in one word “Really?”, I wanted more I desired to know why Angel was in love with Sawyer beyond superficial reasons. What made their bond so strong? This is never explained. Sawyer is like a talking Ken doll he had no personality, beyond being at Angel’s beck and call. We get to learn a bit of his back-story, but it was not enough for me. Angel and Sawyer are that annoying couple that says I love you every two seconds and can’t walk two feet without their partner at their side. I was very disappointed at how this romance was portrayed. There was so much that could have been potentially explored with these two characters, instead these two characters are wasted with superficial encounters and coos about true love.

The novel starts out strong, it defiantly pulled me in. The first few chapters were very fast paced but after a while the book started to drag on a bit and I struggled to get through it. While trying to not give up hope that I would get what I was promised paranormal creatures and a romance story. I wondered while reading the book when the action was going to pick up, and when I would stop hearing Angel wine on and on about Sawyer. I felt that it was entirely ridiculous that for the vast majority of the novel the main character who has just lost her two parents is more worried about her boyfriend than her mother. Yes, she does present a bit of concern and sorrow over the deprivation of her parents; however, she quickly brushes it away and gets back to worrying about her beau. I guess with all the other flaws in this novel the author felt it would be ok to throw in some heteronormative gender stereotypes! At one point in the book Angel is speaking about a specific characters ability to be “surprisingly masculine” despite being gay. I had to read that part twice because I couldn’t believe the author felt it was okay to write something so offensive. You would think this would never pop up in a novel revolving around a girl entangled in an interracial relationship but I guess not. I would not recommend this novel be read by anyone that is looking for a quality paranormal romance book; this book will leave you wanting back the few hours of your life that you wasted reading this book.