🚨 SPOILER ALERT 🚨
This review contains major spoilers – including the ending, key plot twists, and character arcs. Proceed only if you’ve read the book or don’t mind having the story revealed 🫣📖
👀 A Little Intro:
As part of my personal mission to read beyond my usual comfort zone (aka: trying out genres I tend to side-eye 👀), I picked up How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kuang—Goodreads’ 🏆 Best Debut Novel of 2024 and a rising star in the romance world 💘.
And… with all due respect to romance lovers 🫶 either: a) Romance novels just aren’t for me 😬 OR b) The most hyped romance books are… deeply cringy. 😩
Because seriously—what even was this book??
📖 Goodreads Blurb:
Two writers with a complicated history end up working on the same TV show… Can they write themselves a new ending? A sexy and emotional enemies-to-lovers romance guaranteed to pull on your heartstrings and give you a book hangover from brilliant new voice Yulin Kuang.
Helen Zhang hasn’t seen Grant Shepard once in the thirteen years since the tragic accident that bound their lives together forever.
Now a bestselling author, Helen pours everything into her career. She’s even scored a coveted spot in the writers’ room of the TV adaptation of her popular young adult novels, and if she can hide her imposter syndrome and overcome her writer’s block, surely the rest of her life will fall into place too. LA is the fresh start she needs. After all, no one knows her there. Except…
Grant has done everything in his power to move on from the past, including building a life across the country. And while the panic attacks have never quite gone away, he’s well liked around town as a screenwriter. He knows he shouldn’t have taken the job on Helen’s show, but it will open doors to developing his own projects that he just can’t pass up.
Grant’s exactly as Helen remembers him—charming, funny, popular, and lovable in ways that she’s never been. And Helen’s exactly as Grant remembers too—brilliant, beautiful, closed off. But working together is messy, and electrifying, and Helen’s parents, who have never forgiven Grant, have no idea he’s in the picture at all.
When secrets come to light, they must reckon with the fact that theirs was never meant to be any kind of love story. And yet… the key to making peace with their past—and themselves—might just lie in holding on to each other in the present.
(Sounds dramatic, right? Just wait. 😵)
⚠️ Trigger Warnings: Suicide, Loss of family members, Car accidents, trauma, Depression and grief, Graphic sex scenes, Parental estrangement, Light references to therapy/mental health
💬 Review:
We open with a funeral. So far, so heavy. 😔
Helen hasn’t seen Grant since he accidentally hit her sister with his car—an incident that led to her sister’s suicide. It’s been 13 years, and now these two are thrown together as screenwriters on the same TV adaptation 🎬.
Enemies-to-lovers, right? Not quite.
Helen sets clear boundaries 🚷, only to break them when she’s high 🥴 and the two fall into a cycle of… casual sex and confused emotions. After a while, we’re just expected to believe they’ve fallen in love because… time passed? 🫠
Let’s recap some chaotic plot points:
- Helen’s parents HATE Grant 😠
- Helen insists she doesn’t want a relationship 🙅♀️
- They break up 🫤
- Helen gets hit by a truck 🚑 (???)
- Grant calls her a coward while she’s hospitalized and they breakup again?🧍♀️🗣️💥
- Helen has mom issues which never get resolved, she just ignores them in the end 🫢
- Her entire trauma arc is resolved with “my sister would want me to be with the person I love who is Grant” 🤨
- And then… 💍 HEA?
WHAT??
This book had so many emotional landmines and chose to hop over all of them in heels 🩰 and glitter ✨.
✅ What Worked for Me:
🌆 The screenwriter setting was actually fun and fresh
🧠 The theme that even “successful” people are messy hit well
✍️ The writing style itself was smooth and readable
❌ What Didn’t Work:
📉 The plot was chaos incarnate
🫥 The emotional arcs made zero sense
💞 The romance felt flat, unearned, and rushed
🎭 Serious issues were introduced, then… ignored?
🤷♀️ I had SO many questions by the end and zero closure
📊 Rating Table:
| Category | Rating |
|---|---|
| ✍️ Writing | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| 🌍 Setting | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| 👩❤️👨 Characters | ⭐⭐ |
| 📚 Plot | ⭐ |
| ⭐ Overall | ⭐ |
💭 Final Thoughts:
Honestly? This one just didn’t work for me 🙅♀️. I love messy characters, but I need the mess to mean something. Here, it felt like emotional whiplash for the sake of drama.
Not recommending this—unless you like chaotic storylines, unresolved trauma, and a love story that skips every step in favor of vibes 😬💔
Because seriously… can we really end a love story that never existed? 🤷♀️💭
Anushka's Bookish Shenanigans 