From the author of Counting Down with You and A Show for Two comes a new YA contemporary about a girl who accidentally sabotages an up-and-coming local band and falls for the guitarist while secretly trying to make up for her mistake.
Liana Sarkar lives and breathes music, hoping to follow in the footsteps of her A&R coordinator father. Maybe if she succeeds, he’ll finally give her the time of day instead of drowning himself in work to distract from the grief of her mother’s passing.
When Liana accidentally sabotages an up-and-coming local band, Third Eye, she makes it her mission to steer them towards success—without them discovering her role in their setback. But as she gets closer to Third Eye, especially their enigmatic leader Skyler Moon, it becomes harder to hide the truth.
With both her heart and their futures on the line, will Liana be able to undo the damage she’s caused?
Overall Recommendation:
Stay With My Heart is full of musical references and a romances that sweeps you off your feet. Liana was a well-fleshed out protagonist to sympathize with as she embarks on this secret mission to make the band, Third Eye, into a great success. I loved the realness of her struggles, the songs she connected with, and her growing relationship with each of the boys in the band. The romance was so organic even while the impending blow up over her secrets hangs overhead. I couldn’t put this down, and Tashie has slowly secured a spot as a writer that just gets what I want in a love story.
Perfect for fans of They Both Die at the End and You’ve Reached Sam, this gripping, atmospheric YA novel follows a teen with a mysterious condition that transports her to the past when she smells certain scents linked to specific memories.
Seventeen-year-old Aimee Roh has Sensory Time Warp Syndrome, a rare condition that causes her to time travel to a moment in her life when she smells something linked to that memory. Her dad is convinced she’ll simply grow out of it if she tries hard enough, but Aimee’s fear of vanishing at random has kept her from living a normal life.
When Aimee disappears for nine hours into a memory of her estranged mom–a moment Aimee has never remembered before–she becomes distraught. Not only was this her longest disappearance yet, but the memory doesn’t match up with the story of how her mom left–at least, not the version she’s always heard from her dad.
Desperate for answers, Aimee travels to Korea, where she unravels the mystery of her memories, the truth about her mother, and the reason she keeps returning to certain moments in her life. Along the way, she realizes she’ll need to reconcile her past in order to save her present.
From acclaimed author Sarah Suk comes an aching, powerful exploration of memory, grief, and the painful silences we must overcome to discover our truest selves.
Overall Recommendation:
The Space Between Here & Now delivered a capturing story about a girl’s journey in finding her mom, and in the process, finding herself. I love the themes of grief tied into memory as Aimee tackles the abandonment from her mother years later. Mixed with Asian elements woven throughout the novel as Aimee travelled back to Korea to explore her parents’ roots, this book captivated me from the start as I too yearned to learn more about Aimee’s time warp condition and her mother’s disappearance. A definitely recommendation!
You know how smell seems to always be the most powerful thing to instantly draw you back to a particular memory? I love that, being the nostalgic person that I am, but imagine this happening physically. All the time. Aimee suffers from a rare condition, Sensory Time Warp Syndrome, that transports her back into her memories at the most inopportune times when her particular sense, smell, is triggered to an associated memory.
In the same vein as If You Could See the Sun and The Other Side of Infinity, I thought this fictional syndrome was super interesting, and it never felt like just a prop to make this book more intriguing. We dive deep into what the condition entails (little is known but it varies from person to person and dependent on the sense), the people struggling to live in a world trying to avoid particular trigger senses (how awful!), and how this impacts the relationships of those suffering from such a condition.
The characters were absolutely superb. I adored Aimee as a protagonist. She felt very real as she tried navigating this condition that seemed to be triggered more often lately. Her father didn’t want her to go to therapy or additional support groups like an Asian parent may react. So how can she tough it out by herself when being in these memories were happening more frequently and taking up longer time? Her reactions and struggles just made me empathize so much for her, and it made sense she’d yearn for her mom when her dad was just a husk in the home.
The major arcing storyline was Aimee’s search for her mom who had one day just left them when she was a kid. This took her to Korea to learn more about where her mom came from in the hopes that it’d lead her to her mom in the present day. I felt this underlying plot really kept me flipping the pages as I was just as desperate as Aimee to find her mom. Did she know more about her condition? Would she be more sympathetic than her dad? Being in Korea was a plus and I absolutely loved the setting, though it never overshadowed the emotional depth to the story.
My favourite part is definitely the way Sarah Suk looked at grief and memory. Even though her mom wasn’t dead, parental abandonment sometimes hurts more because it seems like an intentional choice to leave. With the memories Aimee kept going back to somehow connected with her mom, it’s clear the years passing hadn’t helped with closure. Things didn’t happen in the way I had anticipated it would, and in that way, I enjoyed the story more. I don’t want to give away too many details so I’ll leave it at that.
There was a romantic element to this book too, but it really played more of a supporting role. He was a great help in Korea while Aimee traced her mom’s path, but he never grew larger than the arcing story about Aimee’s past and her condition. I find it refreshing that romance can have its time and place in stories without overshadowing the main plot. It’s sometimes rarer these days as audiences grow more hungry for heavy romantic subplots.
Overall, this book touched me deeply in its exploration of memory and familial relationships. It was quite different from Sarah’s first novel, but I absolutely love the direction she’s going with and cannot wait to read more from her!
When Chloe Chang gets dumped via USPS after moving across the county from NYC to LA, her first instinct is to throw her box of memories in the garbage. Instead, she starts buying other teenagers’ break-up boxes to create an art exhibit, Heartifacts. Opening night is going great, until she spots Daniel Kwak illicitly filming his best friend’s reaction to his ex’s box. When she tries to stop him, an intense discussion ends up launching a creative partnership and friendship… and a major crush for Chloe.
There’s just one problem: Daniel is dead set on not being another rebound.
Five times he’s been the guy who makes the girls he’s dating realize they want to get back with their ex. And he refuses for there to be a sixth. She insists she’s over her ex, but when he shows up unexpectedly with his new girlfriend, it turns out Daniel was right. She isn’t ready for a new relationship.
She throws herself into making Heartifacts successful, but flashy influencers threaten her original vision of the exhibit. To create the exhibit she’s always wanted, Chloe needs to go back to basics, learn to work with artists in a more collaborative way, and discover what love can be. Only then will she convince Daniel she’s truly ready for everything they could be to one another.
In the tradition of Jenny Han and Emma Lord, Jennifer Chen’s Artifacts of an Ex is a story of love, art, and finding your way when everything you know has changed completely.
Overall Recommendation:
Artifacts of an Ex touches on key themes of loving yourself and learning to let go before falling in love again. While I agree with these things, the execution was not as strong as I had hoped and it was hard to believe in Chloe’s newfound love for Daniel while her breakup was still so fresh. I had also wished for more about her family as they felt like filler rather than important side themes to explore in the book. Overall it was an okay read but it did take me a while to finish it.
**Artifacts of an Ex comes out November 14, 2023**
Thank you Netgalley and the publisher for this copy in exchange for an honest review
There were plenty of things I wanted to love about this book: themes of heartbreak, new love, and the feelings they invoke in us universally. Perhaps some of it was too much to explore altogether in this one novel, or my expectations were too high, but it felt like it bit off more than it could chew.
Chloe quickly gets dumped early on in the book. Her idea to form an art exhibit from people’s shared experiences of heartbreak from an ex was unique and refreshing.
But too much focus was perhaps on the actual planning and replanning of the exhibit. She is apparently a big enough YouTuber who is known for, well, planning. As PlanItGirl, she utilizes a number of, what I guess to be, sponsored items from stationery brands for her planning journals and writing utensils. I never understood all of it as it’s not explicitly explained, so either this is a popular real brand I have absolutely no idea of or it wasn’t meant to be analyzed beyond its mention in the book.
Then we have her Asian family. There are a few side plots with them, namely the fact they moved to LA to be with her ill grandmother. Their search for the recipe ingredients in her grandma’s famous pineapple cakes was fun and I loved the dynamic with her Ahma when she could remember who Chloe was. However, nothing more substantial really takes place beyond this and it leaves me wondering if they were just plot filler to pad out the story. They all feel a little too two-dimensional for characters that did take up a certain amount of space in the book.
My biggest problem, though, was how hard it was to believe Chloe could just fall in love with Daniel so fast after such a breakup with her ex. She barely had time to process her feelings, and when her ex, Jake, popped back in her life post-breakup, she clearly had hoped to still give it another try with him if he also wanted that. This was after she had met Daniel and thought he could be someone of interest to date. With Daniel’s history and his concern as the “rebound” guy, her reassurances to him that she wouldn’t do that seems super hypocritical.
For a book about love, whether new love or loving yourself with your flaws and all, I didn’t really feel either of these things from Chloe’s journey. That, perhaps, is why it was so hard to love this as much as I had hoped from the synopsis. With more focus on this main theme, I may have learned to love it more but it just wasn’t for me.
Down the Rabbit Hole 