Scott Reads It!

Check out Scott Reads It! for reviews, giveaways, & more! "Time heals all wounds. Not all of them, it turns out. Some wounds cut too deep, and some kinds of heartbreak aren't temporary."Often times, a book with a spectacular premise is announced and the blurb immediately grabs you. I read the blurb for The Brokenhearted and couldn't help but download an ARC of it. I really didn't believe this book would be anything like The Dark Knight or Cinder and it turns out I was right. I was skeptical about the comparisons, but I was blinded by the fact that this was a superhero novel. The Brokenhearted by Amelia Kahaney really reminds me of another (painful) packaged book that I had read this year. A Dance Of Shadows by Yelena Black is another YA book with a killer premise, but extremely poor execution. Just like A Dance Of Shadows, The Brokenhearted suffers from a weak romance, bland characters, and a plot that leaves much to be desired. Both books extremely let me down and to be honest, are complete gimmicks.Anthem Fleet is an extremely petulant protagonist, she is incredibly naive and lacks common sense. Would you really go to the most dangerous part to town for a party? Considering how rampant crime is in that part of town and how dangerous everyone says it is, I would avoid it. Of course, Anthem meets a "hot, brooding guy" who rescues her and then immediately falls in love with him. Why does the guy always have to save the damsel in distress?In the media there needs to be less of this:And more of this:The Brokenhearted has one of the worst cases of insta-love I have ever seen to date. It only takes Anthem about one second to fall in love with Gavin and a couple of pages later, she confesses she's in love with him. Then Anthem decides she's going to let him drive her on his motorcycle, I wouldn't trust some random stranger who I just met to drive me on a motorcycle! After Gavin meets Anthem, a couple of chapters later she loses her virginity to him, even though she knows virtually nothing about me. To make things even worse, there's nothing appealing about Gavin AT ALL. The fact that Gavin smokes doesn't make him "artistic" nor does it makes him attractive in any shape or form. Considering Gavin isn't much of a catch, you would think that Anthem would think she deserves him. NOPE! Kahaney decides to make Anthem extremely self-conscious and she complains about her looks, claiming that's she too ordinary. It's okay to be self-conscious, but to wallow in sadness and continuously complain about your looks just doesn't cut it. Just when you thought Gavin couldn't stoop any lower, he tells her: "It's just hard to believe a girl like you would bother with someone like me." This is the most cheesy, cliche line, Kahaney could have possibly stuck in this scene and really angered me. It's not enough that we have an overly, annoying self-conscious heroine, but now we have a male love interest who is convinced that the MC is too good for him. This is NOT okay; The Brokenhearted uses cliche after cliche when it came to the romance. So Anthem gets into an accident and they give her a mechanical heart which gives her superhuman abilities. I'm fine with the whole mechanical heart spiel, but the heart is scarcely mentioned throughout the book. The mechanical heart is mentioned two or three times in passing and that's it. Considering both the title and the cover revolve around the heart, one would think it would be a major plot element instead of being a minor detail. Considering how self-conscious Anthem is, once she becomes a superhero she becomes instantly gorgeous. WHAT?!?! I am beyond the point of trying to understand this book, I just can't even. You would think that becoming a superhero would make The Brokenhearted alot more exciting, but it really didn't. Anthem continued to annoy me by acting harshly to her parents who are already in a bad place; I really thought Anthem was being unfair to them. The action scenes in The Brokenhearted aren't very thrilling and they have a tendency of recycling dialogue from B-List Superhero movies. Anthem begs in one of the key action scenes: "I have money. I'll give you whatever you want." Isn't Anthem supposed to be a superhero? Superheroes don't beg villains to release hostages, they get stuff done by fighting for what they believe in. By the time, Anthem said: "It's me you want, not him", I couldn't take it any longer. Of course The Brokenhearted is a part of a series and it supposedly ends on a cliffhanger, according to reviews that I've read. I'm not sure how that was a cliffhanger at all because I saw where the book was going so much earlier than it was revealed. Also the beginning of a love triangle starts to emerge near the end of the book and it is just so unnecessary. I really think that someone tried to make the most cliche, typical YA book possible because The Brokenhearted comes across as derivative and lame.