A Contemporary Win: foolish hearts

foolish hearts

By: Emma Mills

Grade: A

I’m hit or miss with contemporaries but I really enjoyed foolish hearts which was the Owlcrate book from December. Claudia overhears something she shouldn’t and gets on the bad side of resident mean girl Iris- which eventually lands them both with jobs in the big school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

I heard good things about Emma Mills last book, This Adventure Ends, and I’m definitely going to give it a try.

Foolish Hearts is more slice of life than anything and I appreciate that. I think sometimes what turns me off on contemporaries is the need to turn someone into the big bad villain or more often to have the greatest romance in the history of romances. All the characters in this felt like real and relatable people. None of them were perfect and good. None of them where horrible and evil. They did good things. They did bad things.

Claudia plays an on-line game with her family and grows to understand Iris through fan-girling her favorite band. (FYI spellcheck wanted to change fan-girling to fingering. Got to watch that. :))

Even the romantic entanglements felt realistic. The dialogue read naturally and while they were secondary characters (mainly) I really appreciated the friendship between Gideon and Noah. It was nice to see a male friendship that doesn’t delve into the usual high-school crap they dump on people in some of these books.

Superficially, I really liked the cover of this one!

If I had any issues with this book it did wrap up just a little too nicely and fast. Also I would have loved to have seen the play incorporated more. There’s a couple of cute bits where Claudia coaches people with her knowledge of Shakespeare but it doesn’t come to much.

Recommend: Yes.