About the Book
Title: How to End a Love Story
Author: Yulin Kuang
Genre: Romance
Pages: 384
Edition Read: Hardcover
Dates Read: July 18 – 25, 2025
Blurb: Two writers with a complicated history end up working on the same TV show. Can they write themselves a new ending? A sexy and emotional enemies-to-lovers romance guaranteed to pull on your heartstrings and give you a book hangover from brilliant new voice Yulin Kuang
Helen Zhang hasn’t seen Grant Shepard once in the thirteen years since the tragic accident that bound their lives together forever.
Now a bestselling author, Helen pours everything into her career. She’s even scored a coveted spot in the writers’ room of the TV adaptation of her popular young adult novels, and if she can hide her imposter syndrome and overcome her writer’s block, surely the rest of her life will fall into place too. LA is the fresh start she needs. After all, no one knows her there. Except…
Grant has done everything in his power to move on from the past, including building a life across the country. And while the panic attacks have never quite gone away, he’s well liked around town as a screenwriter. He knows he shouldn’t have taken the job on Helen’s show, but it will open doors to developing his own projects that he just can’t pass up.
Grant’s exactly as Helen remembers him—charming, funny, popular, and lovable in ways that she’s never been. And Helen’s exactly as Grant remembers too—brilliant, beautiful, closed off. But working together is messy, and electrifying, and Helen’s parents, who have never forgiven Grant, have no idea he’s in the picture at all.
When secrets come to light, they must reckon with the fact that theirs was never meant to be any kind of love story. And yet… the key to making peace with their past—and themselves—might just lie in holding on to each other in the present.
Review
This review will be fairly short and sweet, more emphasis on the “short” than the “sweet.” How to End a Love Story won the GoodReads Award for Best Debut in 2024 and, while there were things about it I really liked, it was more of a miss for me.
Oddly enough, it’s not because of the genre. I don’t generally go for the Romance genre in general, but this year has taught me to give it a chance. I have been pleasantly surprised by some of the Romance books I’ve read – they are predictable most of the time, but can still be very fun and charming. That’s just it though – the characters have to be entertaining enough that the predictable ending is still a fun place to end up. It has to be plausible while still maintaining enough suspense to keep me reading. This book . . . didn’t really do that.
First, the things I enjoyed. I really liked Helen. She is trying to find her way in life after living under the expectations of perfectionist parents while also mourning the loss of a sister who always seemed to steal the spotlight. She was extremely relatable. Grant was also very charming and likeable, as was the rest of the writers’ room for this television show. Since this experience moved Helen out of her comfort zone, they did become a found family, which I always love reading about.
For a Romance story to work, the centerpiece of the story has to be the relationship between the two main characters and that’s where this didn’t work for me. Helen literally blames Grant for the death of her sister (it was a car accident, and while he was technically at fault, there were lots of other circumstances as well). She can’t look at him without thinking about it and decides to maintain a careful distance from him the entire time they have to work together. The shift between “careful distance” to “jumping into bed” happened so fast. There felt like barely any transition and it didn’t feel believable at all. The story felt a bit flat after that, and when the relationship is the main part of the story, having that feel flat made the rest of the story lose it’s charm.
GoodReads rating: 3 stars
Categories: Books I've Read
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