Books that will Break Your Heart

What’s worse than falling for someone in secret? Being rejected by them if you confess your feelings? I used to think so. Then I realized my heart didn’t break after they said no but it did when I watched them choose another.

It’s worse when the person you like is your friend. The constant fixture in your life you can’t imagine without or not hearing from every day.

True heartbreak is the agonizing moments you pretend to be happy for them, all the while you die inside with each comment on how amazing the other person is and just how much they really like them.

It’s the tormenting thoughts you can’t stop because it’s hard not to compare yourself to the person they gave a chance to. To feel less than in those instances, wondering with tears in your eyes and seething jealousy why it couldn’t have been you. Knowing you would have loved them more. That you’d be so good together…if they only could see that. If.

That kills.

And here are two books that perfectly capture all the emotions about what happens when you fall for someone and give them your all, hoping they’ll return the love only to realize they’ve given it to another.

1. Our Year of Maybe by Rachel Lynn Solomon

This book wrecked me. All 366 pages of it. Get ready to have your heart shattered as you read about Sophie longing for her best friend Peter who desperately needs a kidney transplant. So, Sophie gives him one because she loves him that much. And yes, secretly hopes that after the transplant, he’ll perhaps love her back the way she’s always wanted him to. But in giving Peter a new kidney, she also gifts him the chance for a new life. One where she isn’t his only friend and soon Peter is making new memories that don’t necessarily involve her. As she grapples with this new reality and her feelings for Peter, her world comes crashing down when he tells her he’s fallen for someone else. Sophie doesn’t know who she or life is without Peter. And because she loves him so hopelessly, she can’t bear the thought of not being with him, of him not choosing her, especially when he once had feelings for her. Read what happens when friendship turns into heartbreak as two people try to hang on to whatever is left, neither wanting to let the other go until the night that changes everything for Peter and Sophie. A finale neither one nor I expected from this beautifully written novel.

2. Dear Emmie Blue by Lia Louis

Emmie has been in love with her best friend Lucas, for a while now. Six years to be exact of painful yearning in their fourteen-year-long friendship. It all started with a red balloon she released in the sky that had her email address when she was sixteen. A balloon that somehow drifted from England all the way to France, where it’d be found, deflated on a beach by a boy named Lucas who’d go on to write to the email address written on the tag. What were the odds this particular guy with the same age and birthday as her and the same obsession with Marmite and Footballers’ Wives would have found it? That they’d instantly connect and become inseparable? It was destiny, surely. This is why Emmie believed that when Lucas called her, asking her to come to France to the restaurant they’d been going to for years, their restaurant with the breathtaking view of the beach they’ve come to define as theirs, because he had something he wanted to ask her, Emmie was sure he was going to confess to secretly being in love with her and take their relationship from longest friends to boyfriend and girlfriend. Except he doesn’t ask her to be his girlfriend but to be his best woman because he’s getting married. To someone else. And now Emmie must fight the urge to tell him how she feels about him or shove those sentiments down and watch him marry another, while she stands beside him at the alter as his best woman.