Review: The Secret Sisterhood of Heartbreakers

By Lynn Weingarten
Available now from HarperTeen
Review copy
Read my interview with Lynn Weingarten

Lynn Weingarten made a splash with her terrific debut WHEREVER NINA LIES. Weingarten explores some of the same themes in THE SECRET SISTERHOOD OF HEARTBREAKERS, but she does so in a different genre and with plenty of twists.

Lucy Wrenn just got dumped. She spent all summer pining after Alex and first day of school . . . dumped. But popular classmates Olivia, Gil, and Liza come to her with an offer. If she can make a guy fall in love with her in a week and then break his heart, then she can have magic. She can be a Heartbreaker like them.

At first, I was very suspicious of Olivia, Gil, and Liza. Their more sinister moments had me yelling at Lucy, "Haven't you seen The Craft?" And it took me awhile to connect to Lucy, who beings THE SECRET SISTERHOOD OF HEARTBREAKERS as a very clingy, needy young woman. I feared where the book was going.

But YA is a genre of bildungsroman. At the core of THE SECRET SISTERHOOD OF HEARTBREAKERS is Lucy's growth as a person. She needs to recognize her positive qualities, her talents, and appreciate herself. She must love herself to have any power.

By the time I finished THE SECRET SISTERHOOD OF HEARTBREAKERS, I felt bad for ever doubting Weingarten. It does not end how I expected, at all, but it's a perfect ending. THE SECRET SISTERHOOD OF HEARTBREAKERS is magical story and even, at times, heartbreaking.

Interview with Lynn Weingarten

Lynn Weingarten is the author of WHEREVER NINA LIES, which came out from Scholastic last month. You can also find her at her MySpace - and an author this exciting ought to have more friends. Before writing WHEREVER NINA LIES, she worked for Alloy Entertainment.

Isn't the single eye visible on her book's cover arresting?

--

1. Your book flap lists jobs you've previously held, including book editor and counter girl at a bakery in Ireland. What was your favorite job and why?

I've liked something about all of my previous jobs, however being a book editor was probably my favorite. It was very exciting to get to work on books and then get to see them in actual book stores and I really loved the people I worked with. That said, I will never forget my first job which was working at a coffee bar when I was 15. I enjoyed pretty much everything about it, up to and including that whenever a cookie broke, we got to eat it. Also, working in Ireland was ridiculously fun. I got to use an electric bread slicing machine and got to take stale bread and feed it to the ducks by the river.

2. Do you plan to be a full time author or to continue holding another job?

I'm actually writing full-time right now. I love it , however I wouldn't rule out my getting a full-time job at some point in the future.

3. My sister ran away (briefly) when I was home. I'll never forget trying to call my parents and tell them she was gone. Since then I've been drawn to books involving runaways. Do you have any personal experience with runaways?

Well I'm very glad your sister came back and is okay! I had a couple friends who ran away during high school. They were identical twin brothers. They ended up being fine, although they were gone for a while and it was definitely scary. The summer I was turning 17 I flew from New York (where me and my runaway friends grew up) to San Francisco to visit my sister. While I was there I actually bumped into one of my runaway friends at Buena Vista Park. My friend gone for a couple months at that point and so seeing him standing there right in front of me, sunburned and barefoot wearing a Snoopy T-shirt, was one of the strangest moments of my life. In the end, he and his brother both came back home and were fine. They were very lucky.



4. How did you decide on the title? Did you have any input on the cover?

Actually someone at Scholastic came up with the title Wherever Nina Lies. We all really liked it and ended up using it for the book. We went back and forth on a lot of different titles before deciding on that one. Two other ones I liked were: Good Girl Gone and Little Red Secrets. (Although some people thought the second title made it sound like a story about girls getting their periods. Ha ha).

As for the cover: I did get to have some input. One day I was looking through a stock photo website online looking for some cover ideas (just for fun, not because anyone had asked me to or anything). I came across a few photos that I thought were cool looking so I sent some of them to my editor. My editor really liked one of a girl holding her finger up to her lips, and so did the people at their Art Department. In the end, Scholastic decided to have a photo shoot and take a picture of a model doing the same pose as the girl in the stock photo.


5. If you could spend time with one fictional character, who would it be? Any fictional characters you would run away from if they suddenly became real?

Hmm, this is a very tough question. Off the top of my head I'm going to say Harry Potter. I think I would really like to fly around on a broom and perhaps he would help me with that. That said, there are a ton of characters it'd be fun to hang out with and I'd like to reserve the right to revise my answer later should this ever somehow become possible.

As for characters I'd run from: anyone in any Stephen King novel. I read a lot of those books when I was a kid and know one would be wise to avoid all those people!

--

I would love to feed bread to ducks in Ireland. That sounds like an awesome job. But here's what ya'll really care about: I have an ARC of WHEREVER NINA LIES for one commenter. Check out this post for the rules.