REVIEW: The Monday Night Heartbreak Club by Jane Lovering

 

Source: Goodreads

Hey everyone,

It has been a while, so long time no see. I felt like writing again, and it felt good to start with this review. I requested this book on Netgalley and was very happy when it got approved, cause the description of this book had me so curious. 

Starting this I wasn't sure what to expect. It was classified as a romance but it ended up being so much more than that. The story follows Fee, who on a night spend drunk in a bar comes across a club for those who had their hearts broken on Valentine's day. Here she meets a bunch of people just like her. Annie suspects her husband is cheating, Margot's husband is divorcing her, Wren just broke up with her partner, Fraser is there with other motives, and then there is that mysterious bartender. 

The writing felt comfortable, it wasn't too flowery for the story it was telling, but it also wasn't too 'easy' to read, if you know what I mean. The story focuses on so much more than the undercover operation. It really shows all the emotions Fee goes through. How she, but also every other member of the club, has been shaped by their past experiences with all kinds of love. All the characters experience so much growth during this story. And honestly, every one of them has found themselves a special place in my heart. I feel like we really get to know everyone very well even though everything is written from Fee's perspective. 

Then the story itself. It was heartwarming, bittersweet, surprising, and so funny. I loved the undercover operation following Annie's husband, but especially the stakeouts. They were funny, yet tense, and they were the moments where you really saw the relationships between characters grow. I loved the plottwists in this books. Both the big ones and the smaller ones. Finding out those little things was often funny and interesting, the bigger onces were shocking, or simply things I had not thought off. I loved how the storyline of the undercover operation was resolved with still a significant chunk of the story to go, but still Lovering managed to keep the hints to that storyline going all the way to the end. 

The big, big plottwist I didn't see coming to be honest. At first I wasn't sure what to think about it, was it too much? But in the end I loved it. It brought all the characters so much closer together, some loose ends needed tidying up, and that is what happened for sure in this part of the book. I do feel like this part of the book moved a little too fast for my liking, it could have used a little more details, and some questions were just immediately resolved within the same chapter, which I think could have been stretched a little. 

But this part of the book also fixed something for me which I did not like earlier on. There was something about FLynn's reaction to Fee's incident with her ex that didn't sit well with me. I didn't like how he used his background (I won't spoiler it) to protect her. But this last part of the book made up for that and I felt like it was making more sense. At first it felt out of the blue, and by this point in the book I felt like I knew Flynn so much better.

Also, the ending makes me want more books about these characters! I think that with this ending there for sure is room for at least one sequel. I ended up giving the book 4.5 stars on my Goodreads and Storygraph.