If there is one thing I always appreciate in a book, it’s consistency. I appreciate when characters have personalities that flow and change, but at a pace that makes sense. Unfortunately, the only thing that is consistent about Seven Rules for Breaking Hearts, is its utter inconsistency.
First, let’s talk about the main draw of any romance, the characters. The only character with a consistent personality and realistic motivations was the main love interest, Declan. He was a good character that left me rooting for him in this otherwise rollercoaster of a relationship both at the story and at the outline level. On the other hand, our main character, Margo, was an inconsistent character with confusing and contradicting motivations and character flaws that didn’t make her unlikable, but they did make her uninteresting. Despite it being a season of change in her life, Margo’s focus on her problems was simply annoying. She didn’t care at all about her friends or other people in her life, but rather that their lives didn’t do what she wanted them to do. That kind of selfishness is hard to support and it made for an MC that was hard to root for.
The writing style was engaging nonetheless with excellent descriptions of the world around our characters. Despite this being set in our world, and thus not really requiring world building, it did a really great job of setting our scenes and describing the island in which Seven Rules was set upon.
The overall story was hard to engage with at times. The core hook of the book, the Rules for Breaking Hearts, didn’t play enough into our story. The plot of this book would have continued on as it was whether or not the rules were followed or broken. This combined with our inconsistent MC, made for an overall mediocre novel. Read it for the setting, skip it for the characters.
Thank you to Netgalley and St Martin’s Press for the opportunity to read this eARC in exchange for my honest opinions.
The Novel Llama 