How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kuang

 Tuesday, Mar. 18, 2025--San Antonio

How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kuang was named a best book of 2024 by TIME.  The plot is a great one--two people who were not friends in high school and are pushed further apart by a tragedy just months before graduation, go their separate ways for years with both becoming writers, and then find themselves on the same writing team for adapting the novel of one of the two into a screenplay for a mini-series.  I found the story and the characters to be exciting.  I thought, "I am reading such a good novel."  Then throughout the 3rd quarter of the novel I started noticing things:  Is this a romance novel?  There are pages of detailed descriptions of the steps of a sexual encounter.  And it repeats and repeats with every sexual encounter.  It was far more detail than was needed for a novel and became a distraction from the good story I was reading.  And there were repetitions of terms--"the tattoo of my heart" (meaning the beat), "gripped my heart" and other expressions written too many times compared to what is expected in a serious novel (versus other creative ways to say the same things when a feeling is repeated).  Fortunately, the book turned back into a really good novel during the final quarter.  By that time, however, I had realized that I could not rate it higher than 3 1/2 stars out of 5.  If only the author had stuck with the real story rather than wandering off to spend so much time describing multiple sexual encounters in almost the same words, I could have raised that rating!