Yulin Kuang

A Novel

How to End a Love Story

Monserrat Navarro 

But it doesn't seem worth it, when the Grant Shepards of the world are so unlikely to cross paths with the grieving Zhang families of the world-gasping mothers, avoiding fathers, gos- siping aunties and uncles, and all-ever again.

Trauma formed love story with a hot romance. Quick and easy read for me. 

Amanda 

tragically beautiful - it had me from start to finish.

I like this so much and then around 3/4 of the way I figured out that there was not going to be as much as I wanted out of this and I felt like those characters deserved that. I think it was more of honoring the characters and who they are, the culture they are raised in, but I still found it kind of disappointing. I think some airiness at the end would have helped with some of the heavy hits. 

Megan Helberg Keiser

This was a beautifully complex romance story. The layout of how these two people know each other isn’t like a second chance, it’s like a meeting of chance. This one sad event that has these two people connected to one another. But while it starts with them not liking each other but having to work with one another they get to know each other. The concept was there I just don’t know how memorable it will be a while from now. It’s like I said a beautiful story in the moment just something that didn’t impact me. 

Priscilla Stanfield

4/5⭐️ • 2/5🌶️

This was a beautifully complex romance story. The layout of how these two people know each other isn’t like a second chance, it’s like a meeting of chance. This one sad event that has these two people connected to one another. But while it starts with them not liking each other but having to work with one another they get to know each other. The concept was there I just don’t know how memorable it will be a while from now. It’s like I said a beautiful story in the moment just something that didn’t impact me. 

✨Helen tries to remind herself that her least favorite thing about herself is how much she cares about what other people think. And that they probably aren’t thinking about her anyway.

✨She could never quite shake the feeling that she wasn’t a particularly vital member of any group—she wasn’t the fun one, or the good-at-planning-things one, or the model-hot one.

✨Like a useless sixth sense, she always knows immediately when he’s in the room.

✨“You’re my favorite thing to look at in that room,” he says suddenly, and drops to his knees in front of her.

✨he feels like he’s just started a new favorite book and he can’t put it down or he’ll lose his place.

✨This is what it would feel like to love Grant Shepard, she thinks, and it aches.

✨“I would have fallen in love with you sooner, if you’d let me,” he says, and lifts her chin so he can watch her hear it. “You’re so easy to love, Helen.”

✨Grant glares at her then. “Suraya called me because she knew I’d want to know. That’s how she put it. I almost didn’t pick up, because I hadn’t slept in thirty-six fucking hours, because I kept replaying our last conversation trying to figure out if I could have said something, anything, that would have changed the outcome. Thank fuck I did pick up, Helen. Do you know what it would have done to me if you’d died and I’d been sleeping?”

✨“You could keep me your dirty little secret, come to me tasting like other men, I’d still take you back every fucking time,” he says, a muscle ticking violently in his jaw. “I’d rather have a fraction of you than all of someone else.” Helen swallows. “I don’t want that for you. For either of us. It’s not—it’s not healthy.” “I don’t want to be healthy,” Grant says, and his chest is heaving as if he’s just run a marathon. “I just want you.”

✨She used to think it was her superpower, her ability to identify her upset emotions and set them carefully aside. This anger isn’t serving us right now; put it aside and deal with the facts. This sadness isn’t helping; turn it off and look for solutions. It made her effective, productive—powerful, even. But she’s found lately that she’s much more emotionally fragile than she used to be. All it takes is a hug while she’s trying to keep it together and the dam breaks, and the tears flow.

✨Helen. I know what you said in that hospital, and I know you ignored my call that day on the train, and I know I haven’t heard a goddamn word from you since, but . . . I’d let you break my heart a thousand more times in exchange for just one more night.

✨The kind of ending where someone else sees the best and worst of me and loves me back. We’d be happy together, we’d be sad together, we’d be everything together. And when it’s all over and we’ve reached another ending, my ashes would be scattered over the tree that grows from his body because till death do us part wouldn’t be enough, because I’d need more than one brief eternity with him.

✨“I want all of it this time,” Grant says, his voice harsh and impossibly close. “I want the nights and the days and the weekends and the holidays and I want you at my side and in my bed and in my life. I want to meet your parents and I want to take you to a sheep farm in fucking Ireland and my dad’s place in Boston. I want to see what kind of person you are when you’re eighty. I want to do this for real, and I want to call you mine so badly it’s a fucking joke, but if you can’t sign up for the whole show this time, then don’t—”

✨She’ll fracture this feeling into a million shards of glass reflecting back the same, unbelievable love story so she can capture it for the days when she needs to read it back to herself and to him—when they’re sad, or tired, or annoyed, or hurting. Or happy, she reminds herself. Loving him is poetry, and she thinks she’ll try her hand at that too.

Mariaaa

✨Helen tries to remind herself that her least favorite thing about herself is how much she cares about what other people think. And that they probably aren’t thinking about her anyway.

✨She could never quite shake the feeling that she wasn’t a particularly vital member of any group—she wasn’t the fun one, or the good-at-planning-things one, or the model-hot one.

✨Like a useless sixth sense, she always knows immediately when he’s in the room.

✨“You’re my favorite thing to look at in that room,” he says suddenly, and drops to his knees in front of her.

✨he feels like he’s just started a new favorite book and he can’t put it down or he’ll lose his place.

✨This is what it would feel like to love Grant Shepard, she thinks, and it aches.

✨“I would have fallen in love with you sooner, if you’d let me,” he says, and lifts her chin so he can watch her hear it. “You’re so easy to love, Helen.”

✨Grant glares at her then. “Suraya called me because she knew I’d want to know. That’s how she put it. I almost didn’t pick up, because I hadn’t slept in thirty-six fucking hours, because I kept replaying our last conversation trying to figure out if I could have said something, anything, that would have changed the outcome. Thank fuck I did pick up, Helen. Do you know what it would have done to me if you’d died and I’d been sleeping?”

✨“You could keep me your dirty little secret, come to me tasting like other men, I’d still take you back every fucking time,” he says, a muscle ticking violently in his jaw. “I’d rather have a fraction of you than all of someone else.” Helen swallows. “I don’t want that for you. For either of us. It’s not—it’s not healthy.” “I don’t want to be healthy,” Grant says, and his chest is heaving as if he’s just run a marathon. “I just want you.”

✨She used to think it was her superpower, her ability to identify her upset emotions and set them carefully aside. This anger isn’t serving us right now; put it aside and deal with the facts. This sadness isn’t helping; turn it off and look for solutions. It made her effective, productive—powerful, even. But she’s found lately that she’s much more emotionally fragile than she used to be. All it takes is a hug while she’s trying to keep it together and the dam breaks, and the tears flow.

✨Helen. I know what you said in that hospital, and I know you ignored my call that day on the train, and I know I haven’t heard a goddamn word from you since, but . . . I’d let you break my heart a thousand more times in exchange for just one more night.

✨The kind of ending where someone else sees the best and worst of me and loves me back. We’d be happy together, we’d be sad together, we’d be everything together. And when it’s all over and we’ve reached another ending, my ashes would be scattered over the tree that grows from his body because till death do us part wouldn’t be enough, because I’d need more than one brief eternity with him.

✨“I want all of it this time,” Grant says, his voice harsh and impossibly close. “I want the nights and the days and the weekends and the holidays and I want you at my side and in my bed and in my life. I want to meet your parents and I want to take you to a sheep farm in fucking Ireland and my dad’s place in Boston. I want to see what kind of person you are when you’re eighty. I want to do this for real, and I want to call you mine so badly it’s a fucking joke, but if you can’t sign up for the whole show this time, then don’t—”

✨She’ll fracture this feeling into a million shards of glass reflecting back the same, unbelievable love story so she can capture it for the days when she needs to read it back to herself and to him—when they’re sad, or tired, or annoyed, or hurting. Or happy, she reminds herself. Loving him is poetry, and she thinks she’ll try her hand at that too.

How to End a Love Story A Novel

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