Title: Broken Hearts, Fences, and Other Things to Mend
Series: Broken Hearts & Revenge #1
Author: Katie Finn
Format: Hardback, 339 pages
Rating: 4 stars
Time to Read: 2 days
Recommend it?: Yes, for anyone into chick lit, and those who like a good revenge :]

 

Goodread's Bio: Gemma had her summer all planned out, but it takes a sharp turn when she gets dumped and finds herself back in the Hamptons after a five-year absence.

Being there puts her at risk of bumping into Hallie, her former best friends (that is, before Gemma ruined her life). But people don't hold grudges forever. Do they?

Gemma intends on making amends, but a small case of mistaken identity causes the people she knew years ago—including Hallie and her dreamy brother, Josh—to believe she's someone else. As though the summer wasn't complicated enough already


My Review: aw revenge, a girls dream come true. I liked this book very much. I’ve had my fair share of moments where I wished I could ruin anothers life. Gemma is just more brave than I because I never could go though with it.

Gemma ruins her “best friends” life in order to save her family, but of course it goes wrong, hey when doesn’t it. She then gets a second chance later in life to fix what she messed up. She does try her hardest too :]

I just loved Gemma she is a clumsy, totally relatable character. I cringed along with her as various things decided to not go her way throughout the story.

The last few pages had me thou! I didn’t see that coming at all, and I must say I am not looking forward to waiting for the next one! Be here nowwww!!!!

Due to copy and paste, formatting has been lost.

Let's just be honest here: doesn't this just look like the cutest summer revenge read? It does. But it really fell short of it's potential for me. For me it's sometimes just a little too hard to understand the motivation for revenge, and BHFaOTtM just didn't have a very plausible plot for me. Why spend most of your life plotting revenge for something that happened when you were a kid? You should just build a bridge and get over it!

Once I finished reading it, all I could think was "bleh, this is a series? Why?" Because it seemed like this all should have ended in the first book, since it was stupid to begin with. But I digress. BHFaOTtM was pretty cheesy on top of being dumb... which kind of upset me. It was easy to guess what would happen next, and I found myself predicting everything before it happened.

And don't even get me started on the characters! BLEH. First, we have the boy that Gemma is hopelessly in love with - Teddy. Who is a crunchy hippy who keeps all of his ducks in a row, does everything right, and is the perfect person. Except he's boring as all get out, is one of those people who has to be involved in anything (even things that don't concern him), and has to have the perfect, sweet, innocent girlfriend. Ick.

I like him already, don't you folks? Besides the debatable love interest, we also have Gemma herself. I'll tell you straight up that she's a liar, and that she has to have everything her way... which I just couldn't stand. She whines too much, schemes a lot, and doesn't really appear to be very smart. Not only is she decidedly not-smart, she's also extremely dense.

Basically, Broken Hearts, Fences, and Other Things to Mend was really not for me. I couldn't get into the plot or the characters, and the revenge angle of the story seemed very one-sided to me. But who knows, this just might be your cup of tea!

This reminds me of a mix of Massie (and the privileged Hamptons outlook) and a prolonged fight between Blair and Serena from Gossip Girl (from the t.v. show, as I have not yet read the books). As Massie played with passive-aggressive privileged white girls and social satire, so did this book in the varying forms of petty schemes dealt by these girls and the karma that comes back to haunt them along with the urge for revenge.

I liked that this book was very upfront and matched with what you're told about it. If you were a fan of the series I mentioned above, you may well be a fan of this book. It tells you what Gemma did from the very beginning so that you'll understand the context behind how she and Hallie interact rather than keeping that secret for prolonged tension. The fun comes from the various schemes and trying to predict what each girl would do next. How one would get out of a situation and the other would plan it. Some of these plans? Man. These girls are thorough. Caught in the middle of the passive aggressive sort-of-fight is Hallie's brother Josh and the adorable romance that forms between Gemma and him. I'm rooting for you, Josh. You're probably the most morally guided one of the lot and maybe the least fun except for your dorky jock-ness, but hey, you're adorable and I'm wondering what role you'll play in the next books...

This is a contemporary series and I can't help but admire the way Katie Finn has set up the series. There were a lot of hints in this novel of things to come and I'm interested in seeing how the consequences play out. I like how the titles match and give you a clue of what to expect from Gemma. I'm glad she fought back in her own way in this novel, at least trying somewhat to make things right after doing something horrible, and I'm curious to see what she'll be like when she's no longer eleven-year-old Gemma but a much older version, more elaborate in her revenge. You definitely get to see the good, the bad, and the ugly in these characters. Definitely different from most YA contemporary out now and a fun beach read.

Broken Hearts, Fences, & Other Things to... Review added 4/18/14:

I can’t stand novels where nothing is resolved and the end is really a “to be continued”. I’ll admit, I missed the reference in the blurb to Broken Hearts… being the first in a series, so I was operating under the assumption that we’d get a neat stand-alone climax, but that still doesn’t excuse the non-ending. The only resolution is confirmation of the plot “twist” that I think everyone guessed by chapter 9. And it’s a real shame, because I enjoyed a lot about this book.

Gemma’s recent breakup has her summering with her dad in the Hamptons. She hasn’t been back since she somewhat-accidentally ruined his, his girlfriend, and her kid’s lives five years ago, and she’s nervous that she might run into their family. My big problem with this plot point is it requires an eleven year old to be both insanely savvy and manipulative, and it requires us, (and someone she knows,) to hold that against a child. I almost wish this was a new adult title, so the age gap would be more like fifteen to twenty instead of eleven to sixteen. I don’t care how badly you messed up at eleven when your parents were divorcing but not actually telling you that so you got upset and wrecked your future-step-mom’s stuff. YOU’RE A KID.

The book wouldn’t really work as a NA, though, because Gemma’s naivety and innocence are her main character traits. When things start to go sideways in a way that would make any other person say, “hmm…”, Gemma blindly continues her plot, confident in her non-existent espionage skills and the general goodness of humanity. You see, through a series of coincidences, Gemma ends up sitting with her dad’s ex’s son, Josh on the train in. He sees a coffee cup with her best friend’s name on it and assumes she’s Sophie. Seeing a chance to make things right, Gemma adopts the nom de plume and sets about re-becoming best friends with him and Hallie.

Despite sometimes being as dense as fruitcake, I found Gemma to be sweet and she seemed to really try to make the charade work, not so she wouldn’t be found out, but from a desire to make things right. She was endearing. Josh, the eventual love interest, was also endearing, but in a bit of a bland, stock-trope kind of way. I liked him best suffering food poisoning and watching the Princess Bride.

There were some loose plot threads, like the fact that her dad was supposed to be back with his business partner and his son, the inevitable second leg to a love triangle, on the night of the climax, but then just...wasn’t. Or the super duper important statue that was broken and sent out for repairs that was never noticed as missing. But I would have forgiven the book those and told you all this was a sweet, not overly deep beach book about redemption and mistaken identity and silly, but ultimately harmless, revenge plots. But I can’t.

The end made me feel so cheated. It’s not that there wasn’t enough resolution, it’s that nothing Gemma did mattered. Someone holds a five year old grudge over her in a way over the top way, especially considering dad’s ex is not worse for the wear. She’s pretty obviously this universe’s E.L. James and ungodly rich, so… I ended the book actually angry that we’re getting another novel that will be filled with more petty revenge shenanigans instead of the end that was being set up. I felt swerved in the last dozen pages; instead of feeling like I needed book two, I just felt like I’d wasted my time caring for these people.


4/10/14: Fuck that bullshit ending. What a rotten cop-out. I called the twist, but even if I hadn't, I can't imagine anything less satisfying than that end. Seriously I'm actually angry.

Review to come, probably.