Our Chemical Hearts by Krystal Sutherland

Grace Town has taken the huge step of changing schools in Senior Year and this has brought her to the notice of Henry Page.  Grace Town walks with a cane, wears boys/mens clothes and has self cut hair; despite these traits which would be fodder for the bullies in any other school this makes her all the more enigmatic and interesting to Henry. 

Henry is, to say the least, inexperienced and more than a little naive.  His only real romantic interlude to date was with his best friend Lola who decided, directly after kissing him, that she was actually a lesbian.  It's fair to say that Grace Town turns his world completely upside down and inside out.

This is a quirky first love story set over the first semester of the school year.  It deals with the enormity of the emotional shock that this love failing generates.  Primarily this is via Henry's friend Murray who has loved and lost "Sugar Ghandi" and would suffer any ignominy to get her back.  Then the all consuming grief of Grace for her previous boyfriend Dom and finally the revelations of Henry's sister Sadie about the real state of their parent's marriage.

Told with a mixture of prose and text exchanges the story flows easily and reads semi-realistically.  I did find that I couldn't really get invested in any of the characters and after the first half of the book I wanted to knock Henry and Grace's heads together and tell them to stop being so internalised and selfish.  Then again, that is the true nature of the teenager I suppose.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with this book, but I think it suffers a little from me being older than the target demographic by quite a few years.

**Review originally published October 31st, 2017**