HOLIDAY HAPPINESS: Book Review: My Heart and Other Black Holes

Title: My Heart and Other Black Holes

Author: Jasmine Warga

Publisher: HarperCollins/Balzer + Bay

Release Date: February 10, 2015

Format Read: Hardback

Description from Goodreads: Sixteen-year-old physics nerd Aysel is obsessed with plotting her own death. With a mother who can barely look at her without wincing, classmates who whisper behind her back, and a father whose violent crime rocked her small town, Aysel is ready to turn her potential energy into nothingness.

There's only one problem: she's not sure she has the courage to do it alone. But once she discovers a website with a section called Suicide Partners, Aysel's convinced she's found her solution: a teen boy with the username FrozenRobot (Aka Roman) who's haunted by a family tragedy is looking for a partner.

Even though Aysel and Roman have nothing in common, they slowly start to fill in each other's broken lives. But as their suicide pact becomes more concrete, Aysel begins to question whether she really wants to go through with it. Ultimately, she must choose between wanting to die or trying to convince Roman to life so they can discover the potential of the energy together. Except that Roman may not be so easy to convince.

This is probably going to be a short review. 

Suicide is a topic that I don't take lightly. It's something that I think too many people are aware of, yet so many people don't care enough about to help, and generally I'm fine with reading books that deal with suicide. But everyone loved MY HEART AND OTHER BLACK HOLES, and I didn't care for it.

In MY HEART, Aysel and Roman meet, and you can pretty instantly feel their connection. You know they'll either be more than friends by the end of the book, or that they'll be constantly on this edge of friends-or-not-friends. Aysel was ready for suicide until she met Roman, and then she started having doubts, and that's when things just... went downhill, for me. It was too predictable a storyline from there on out, and the ending was a bit bland in my opinion. I couldn't connect to the characters very well-- I felt like they were page characters and not real-to-me characters-- and I felt emotionally detached from the story.

MY HEART AND OTHER BLACK HOLES is a one star read for me, based upon those points, but I know that it received a ton of praise. Did I miss a crucial point to the story?

(Un)Happily,

Stephanie