Heart Bones

"People sometimes still drown in the shallow end," he whispers.

This was a very good story, with real world problems slipped into its pages. Samson and Beyah are both imperfect characters, with solid gray areas instead of black and white - bad or good. I liked that about them, too squeaky good and nice isn't realistic and cackling mustache twirling bad guys is just ridiculous.

I loved the setting, this idea of a summer away at a beach area. Who doesn't want to be someone different or leave their worries and lives behind for a whole summer and just be free?
Maybe next summer we'll be closer to the normal we know.

Colleen Hoover’s Heart Bones is a raw, radiant triumph—equal parts heartbreak and healing, stitched together with poetic grit.

If Home Front cracked you open, Heart Bones will sift through the pieces and ask which ones are worth keeping. This is not just a summer romance—it’s a survival story wrapped in salt air and second chances.

Strengthen Your Heart Bone

Stunning. Seriously, just a really beautiful, powerful romance. I had no idea what to expect going into this - and that’s how I’d recommend everyone go into it - so the story unraveled in such an organic, mesmerizing way. From page one, you can tell that there’s an intensity about the book that sets it apart from the rest; a heaviness that gives this love story such WEIGHT. And it truly is a love story. Our heroine goes on her own journey throughout the course of the book, but through it all, there’s that one guy who makes an impact. It’s one of the best books I’ve read all year, hands down, and the kind of story that you’ll want to reread with fresh eyes as soon as you turn the last page. I can show more say for sure that this has made my favorites box this year. I just finished Layla by the same author and that was such a different experience.

I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about the plot on this one, because I think you should discover it as you read. There’s an incredible build in intimacy, a slow burn romance with depth, and a mysterious quality to both our hero and the story as a whole. The book kicks off on a somber note and does have a heavy feel to much of it, but there is also so much wonder and that feeling you only get with young love. It’s new adult romance with a 19-year-old heroine who is just starting to really live. She comes from a troubled background, with many, many triggers in her history, and they appear right away. I think that the triggers are needed to show depth of character and makes me love Beyah even more. As for Samson I felt him to be so genuine and so broken that you couldn’t help but love them as a couple.

My favorite part about the book? It is so engaging yet makes you really think about love, yourself and the world around you and how people make the best of the life they are given. Told exclusively from the heroine’s perspective, there are little breadcrumbs along the way that tell us more about the hero. These two seem so different on the surface, but the more they wade into the depths, the more commonalities they discover. At one point, I was so convinced that I knew where the story was heading... but I was completely wrong. And I love that. It kept me engrossed from start to finish, and I ended up devouring it in one sitting. Even though my review is days after I read it. That doesn’t take away from how much I enjoyed it. show less

[3.5] this one did not end up going in the direction i thought it was going to, but i did still enjoy it!! reading a beach-y, summer-y read on holiday always goes down well and i think it was the perfect book to do that with. i wasn’t overly keen on either of the mc’s first, and didn’t always agree with the decisions they were making, but i think that was almost the point of the book: that people can change and make mistakes and still be good people. from the “plot twist” moment onwards, it did feel a bit rushed, and i would have loved an epilogue, but mostly, just a quick holiday read.

Colleen Hoover is good at sucking you into a story from page one. This starts off as a tragic tale as Baya returns home from her shift at McDonald’s to find her mother has OD’d on meth and is lying dead on the couch in their trailer home. Her landlord kicks her out on the spot as soon as the police take the body away because her mom was three months late on rent, and Baya is left with no choice but to call her dad, who she hasn’t seen in years, and ask if she can go stay with him.

I always enjoy the slow unraveling of secrets in a CoHo book, and this one has plenty. Sarah, Baya’s new stepsister, was a character I instantly loved. Sampson, her new neighbor, is hiding more than he lets on. Baya’s dad is remarried now. Her show more entire childhood, he sent support checks that she never saw because her mother used them for drugs. The lies and deceit in this one are through the roof! This had so many twists and turns (one BIG twist!!) and interesting character backgrounds as everyone had their own struggles to overcome. I particularly liked how everything was handled after the big reveal. A wonderful tale I had a hard time putting down.

Please excuse typos/name misspellings. Entered on screen reader. show less

I'll read pretty much anything by Colleen Hoover because she's so damn good at portraying all sides of her characters. Beyah has come to live with her father on the Texas coast after her mother dies. Her childhood has been tragic and it's hard to assimilate into her new life with her father's successful new wife, step-daughter, and wealthy lifestyle. She's determined to get through the summer and onto college without any involvements, especially the handsome neighbor Samson who seems to have always had everything he ever needed or wanted. But this is Colleen Hoover, so nothing is what it seems.
There are plot twists after plot twists and I wasn't sure this was going to be a romance with a happy ending. Everything is against Beyah and show more Samson, but they are strong characters, determined to follow their own paths. It's a lovely, but tragic story. Oh, and uplifting. It's everything that Ms. Hoover is best at as a writer. show less

This book captured a piece of my soul. It’s about first love and broken heart bones and family and fathers. It’s about this intense time in life when we make decisions that determine the trajectory of our adult lives while feeling emotions rush over us more powerfully than we ever have or ever will, like a tidal wave washing over us unexpectedly. It’s about so many things, but my favorite part is that it’s a love letter to the ocean and sunrises on the beach, the place where the salt and sand and wind refill our weary souls.

“Seeing the ocean in person is almost as important as having food and shelter. It doesn’t seem farfetched to believe a charity should exist for the sole purpose of allowing people to afford a trip to the show more beach. It should be a basic human right. A necessity. It’s like years of therapy, rolled up into a view” (41). show less