How to Win a Breakup by Farah Heron

This was an entertaining book. I don’t always enjoy a high-school-based tale(given my current age), but I tend to give it a shot here and there and end up liking some of them. This was one such book, and I ended up reading this in almost a single sitting. The writing was good, and the diverse cast was all introduced with proper background information, providing a complete picture of everything that was going on. Our almost-over-achieving leading lady is in a fix. She had a bad ending to the previous year and is now short of a few things on her resume that she thought she would have by now. This is a direct impact of a very public breakup at the end of the previous year. There is a subtle mix of childish tantrums as well as calm ruminations of those on the brink of independence and adulthood by the time we see the entire story through. Samaya has a finger in a lot of pies. She wants to get a game app up and running as well as add something different to her resume. The latter leads her to help cook (since she cannot cook at all) at a community centre. The former means life in school is hard. Samaya is also playing a game with an anonymous person online who is someone she is getting quite close to. She uses that person’s profile picture to announce to her school that she has moved on. This complicates matters even further, adding chaos to an extremely chaotic year. I thought that the book could have been shorter (even as it felt like a quick read) because once the chaos piles up, things seem to drag. This is probably the only negative I have for the entire book. We meet different kinds of students with differing priorities who all end up showing their true colours by the time the end rolls around. Each individual character felt like their own person. This is the story’s strongest part. I would recommend it to readers of this genre. I received an ARC thanks to NetGalley and the publishers but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience.