HEART BONES by COLLEEN HOOVER

‘Kindness doesn’t sink as deep into your skin as the damage does. The damage stains your soul so bad; you can’t scrub it off. It stays there forever, and I feel like people can see all my damage just by looking at me.’

We can’t envisage a time when we’re not overcome with excited anticipation at the release of a Colleen Hoover book. We’ve been overwhelmed with emotion so many times by her phenomenal writing, been enveloped in love with her beautiful characters, had our hearts soaring and crushed by her stories, oh and yes, we’ve even shocked to the core by her suspenseful thrillers! What an incredibly gifted storyteller this lady is.

Colleen has a way of delving into real emotions. You become so acquainted with her characters, their pain becomes your pain. And in Heart Bones, she has once again wormed her way into our…well… our heart bones, brilliantly manipulating our emotions, and we love it!

“You can fill your life with nice things, but nice things don’t fill the holes in your soul.”
“What fills the holes in a soul?”
Samson’s eyes scroll over my face for a few seconds. “Pieces of someone else’s soul.”

There’s a line Colleen uses in Heart Bones that so aptly described how we felt about Samson and Beyah, and that is ‘Damaged people recognize other damaged people. It’s like a club you don’t’ want a membership to.’ What a line, and it so perfectly sums up Heart Bones.

Beyah hasn’t had it easy in life. Denied a mother’s love and unable to remember much of her time with her absent father, Beyah had to find the grit to survive and her strength and resolve was a credit to her. Living in a trailer in Kentucky, with her drug-addicted mother, scraping by to merely feed herself, Beyah thinks on her feet and find somewhere to live when her Mum passes away. Beyah makes the difficult decision to call her absent father to spend the summer with him in Galveston before heading off to college in Pennsylvania.

That summer Beyah would find so much more than she had expected. A prickly little pear, she was a girl who held her cards tight to her chest, but little by little her stepsister and their neighbour, Samson would chip at her defences.

‘Every time we kiss, it’s as if we leave more of ourselves inside the other.’

Samson and Beyah were kindred spirits – on the surface they were opposite – her the damaged poor girl, him the rich entitled handsome and popular guy, but Samson is shrouded in secrecy and also playing his cards close to his chest.  They agree to a summer together and then part ways – Beyah to college, Samson to join the air force, but so much can happen in a summer as secrets are uncovered.

“I wasn’t expecting to end the summer with a broken heart.”
“Don’t worry. Hearts don’t have bones. They can’t actually break.”

Colleen Hoover was blessed with a god-given talent to tell a story, and we’re so lucky she chooses to share her stories with us all. Heart Bones is an emotional story of first love, second chances and about finding the truth inside. A story of family and love, two things Colleen Hoover does so well.

‘I know what love is because I spent my whole life knowing what it isn’t.’