The Heart Principle

Thank you to Berkley and Dreamscape Media for gifting me review copies of The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang. I loved it so much I also chose it as my Book of the Month selection!

This is the third book in The Kiss Quotient series, and if you haven't read the first two you really should, they're so good!

Anna Sun is a violinist who goes viral on YouTube, but then finds herself completely burnt out by trying to replicate that success. While she's struggling to understand herself better her stress is compounded when her boyfriend declares that he wants to play the field before settling down. Hurt, angry, and looking to take back some control in her life, Anna decides that if he wants an open relationship he's going to get one. In other words, she's going to have some fun of her own. Enter Quan Diep. He's inked-up, rides and motorcycle, and hotter than sin. Anna thinks she wants a one-night stand, but Quan seems to understand and accept her in ways she doesn't expect.

I always love Hoang's characters so much. They're real and nuanced and I always feel like I really know them. This book will leave you feeling raw and emotional—it's intense but beautiful. There are a lot of serious topics in the book, but they're handled in a way that will rip your heart wide open but also make you want to hug the book when you're done.

The audiobook was so wonderfully narrated by Brian Nishii and Natalie Naudus (who you might also recognize from One Last Stop and the Dating Dare—she’s quickly becoming one of my favorite narrators). The audio comes in at nine and a half hours, but once I started I really couldn’t stop and just binged it in a weekend.

Basically, if you haven't got this on your TBR yet, you need to rectify that.

Synopsis:

When violinist Anna Sun accidentally achieves career success with a viral YouTube video, she finds herself incapacitated and burned out from her attempts to replicate that moment. And when her longtime boyfriend announces he wants an open relationship before making a final commitment, a hurt and angry Anna decides that if he wants an open relationship, then she does, too. Translation: She's going to embark on a string of one-night stands. The more unacceptable the men, the better.

That’s where tattooed, motorcycle-riding Quan Diep comes in. Their first attempt at a one-night stand fails, as does their second, and their third, because being with Quan is more than sex—he accepts Anna on an unconditional level that she has just started to understand herself. However, when tragedy strikes Anna’s family she takes on a role that she is ill-suited for, until the burden of expectations threatens to destroy her. Anna and Quan have to fight for their chance at love, but to do that, they also have to fight for themselves.