Our Chemical Hearts: as seen on Amazon Prime

Grace Town has taken the huge step of changing schools in Senior Year and this has brought her to the notice of Henry Page. Grace Town walks with a cane, wears boys/mens clothes and has self cut hair; despite these traits which would be fodder for the bullies in any other school this makes her all the more enigmatic and interesting to Henry. Henry is, to say the least, inexperienced and more than a little naive. His only real romantic interlude to date was with his best friend Lola who decided, directly after kissing him, that she was actually a lesbian. It's fair to say that Grace Town turns his world completely upside down and inside out. This is a quirky first love story set over the first semester of the school year. It deals with the enormity of the emotional shock that this love failing generates. Primarily this is via Henry's friend Murray who has loved and lost "Sugar Ghandi" and would suffer any ignominy to get her back. Then the all consuming grief of Grace for her previous boyfriend Dom and finally the revelations of Henry's sister Sadie about the real state of their parent's marriage. Told with a mixture of prose and text exchanges the story flows easily and reads semi-realistically. I did find that I couldn't really get invested in any of the characters and after the first half of the book I wanted to knock Henry and Grace's heads together and tell them to stop being so internalised and selfish. Then again, that is the true nature of the teenager I suppose. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with this book, but I think it suffers a little from me being older than the target demographic by quite a few years.

“Tell me you believe our lives are anything more than a ridiculous cascade of random chances.” What if your first love isn’t like how the movies tell you it will be? What if the first love of your life showed up one random day in oversized male clothing, dirty and with clumps of hair all raggedly chopped up? What if there was no music in the background, an awkward bumping into each other moment with eye contact or one look across a crowded room where you just… knew? What if “love” is nothing but a chemical reaction in the brain, meant to fizzle out? What if? Henry Page has spent his life waiting for the girl of his dreams. He’s never felt anything remotely close to love – or even like – in his life, and is waiting for his movie like moment. And so, when Grace Town walks into his class and barely gives him a second look in her baggy clothes and bad personal hygiene, he doesn’t expect her to be the one giving him butterflies in his stomach or occupying his thoughts in the dark. And then she gets put onto the editorial committee (consisting of Henry and Grace) of the school newspaper, and a strange bond forms. With their pet fish, Ricky Martin Knupps II, a barrage of sarcastic banter, strange car rides and philosophical talk, Henry experiences what he’s been waiting for, even if it’s not all he dreamed it would be. But Grace is not all here – she’s broken, a ghost, and only half alive. So what can a half here girl have to give to a boy in love with the idea of her unbroken version? What if the main character in this particular chemical reaction isn’t worth more than a passing glance in the whole plethora of reactions in the universe – and the brain? ”Love doesn’t need to last a lifetime for it to be real. You can’t judge the quality of love by the length of time it lasts. Everything dies, love included.” Our Chemical Hearts was NOT what I expected it to be – which was a fluffy romance filled with dramatic pauses and rainbow endings. Instead, Our Chemical Hearts was RAW, filled to the brim with BEAUTIFUL WORDS and soul shattering pain, and I could not be more in love than I am at this moment. I adored EVERYTHING about this book, including the secondary characters. I LOVED Lola and Murray and Sadie and Ryan and Madison Carlson and the teachers and all the parents, because everything about this book screamed REAL and WONDERFUL and BROKEN and captured the VERY ESSENCE of what it is to be alive and to fall in and out of love. Not your average book, but something SO MUCH BETTER. If you’ve looking for a book that will haunt you long after you’ve put it down, welcome to Our Chemical Hearts. A MASTERPIECE.

Our Chemical Hearts ,Amazing book, the way the author expresses the feelings of the characters with words in beautiful, if your having a rough time with a relationship, or have felt the pain of a relationship will be able to relate allot. also the ones having a healthy relationship will love it , this is a great book to read. Loved it from the beginning till the end, Especially the ending where probably allot of people can relate to if they have ever been in a relationship .One of my favorite books Would totally recommend you to buy it and sit the whole day to read it.