Broken Hearts, Fences, and Other Things to Mend (Broken Hearts & Revenge Novel, #1)

by Katie Finn

[Leah]

When I spotted Broken Hearts, Fences And Other Things To Mend on Netgalley, I was immediately sucked in by the title! I mean, come on! How can you resist such an awesomely worded title? (The two sequel titles are even better – Revenge, Ice Cream and Other Things Best Served Cold & Hearts, Fingers & Other Things To Cross). Seriously, they are immediately my favourite book titles ever for being so clever. I also really loved the swirly writing on the cover – it’s super cute and made me want to invesitage the book more, which I did and I found that I was also very intrigued by the synopsis, so I requested a copy, crossed my fingers, and was super happy to be accepted to review the book! I couldn’t wait to get started, and it was such a charming little book!

Broken Hearts, Fences And Other Things To Mend was such a wonderful little novel. Most of the action, I will admit, comes at the end of the book, leaving you on a cliff-hanger I really wasn’t expecting – it’s super scary to get to 100% of a book and not be finished, let me tell you, and I was proven correct in that there is quite the cliff-hanger and quite the wait until 2015 for the second book! But since it was such a dastardly ending, with revelations whipping back and forth faster than the ball in a tennis match, I was sort of left smiling because it was quite the bloody ending! It was like all of a sudden it all spewed out, and although I had my suspicions – and I had debunked them, thinking that that was CRAY CRAY and totally beyond the realm of what I had imagined, I was still surprised to be proven correct. It was the type of ending that makes you do a double take and immediately makes you go pre-order the next book in the series! It’s that good! Spectacular and I will be pre-ordering Revenge, Ice Cream and Other Things Best Served Cold as soon as I possibly can!

Compared to the stunning end of the book, the rest of the book seems rather tame in comparison, but it’s a lovely beach read. I totally felt for Gemma when her boyfriend, Teddy, dumped her and she ends up abandoning her plans to travel and dig latrines in the summer and instead ends up going to the Hamptons to see her Dad. A place she never wants to visit again after a particularly harrowing trip there when she was 11 that ended in a ruined friendship and a broken relationship. I was totally there with her when she decided to be Sophie, especially when she runs into Hallie Bridges, the girl whose life she ruined 5 years prior. Who wouldn’t take up the opportunity of fixing a damaged/potentially ruined friendship if you had the chance? We all have friendships we regret ending and people we regret hurting, so it must be part of us all to want to fix it. And it was pretty great seeing Gemma try and redeem herself, even if there seemed to be obstacles all along the way – the bikini scene in particular was hilarious, along with the lobster scene, even if it was awfully horrible in both instances for Gemma to have to deal with.

I really, really enjoyed Broken Hearts, Fences and Other Things To Mend. It was clever, it was sweet, and I liked the message it projected. I liked that Gemma wasn’t your typical self-involved, selfish teenager, and that she was willing to try and put right her wrongs. What she did wasn’t terrible – it wasn’t right, don’t get me wrong, but at 11 and having to deal with what she learns, I could hardly blame her for what she did! Katie Finn is a fantastic writer and very much kept the pace going, and I got through the book at quite a clip, wanting to see if Gemma could bridge the gap as Sophie and be friends with Hallie, or if more incidents would occur! I wanted more of the lovely friendship between Sophie/Gemma and Josh, which will be something to keep a very close eye on in the next books (I hope so, anyway) and it was just such a lovely book! I am disappointed it was left on such a big cliff-hanger, meaning almost a year’s wait til the second book, but it was a clever ending, and didn’t make me as mad as an ending like that normally would. It sort of made sense, and it leads into the next book very nicely, and hopefully there’ll be more hi-jinks and revenge and stuff, because I like that, I like that a lot!