Actual rating is 3.5/5
Made to Break Your Heart follows Nick Marhoffer, a reporter who struggles balancing his job during the global financial crisis of 2008, his family and coaching a little league team. Due to the pressures of his life and feeling a lack of support from his wife, he starts to find his eyes wandering to the mother of one of his little league players, Tess Sugarmeier.
The novel is easy to read and almost reads like a succession of diary entries. However, I found that I was never emotionally invested in any of the characters to the point of caring about their well-being. I feel like we were meant to root for Nick but most of the time I found him to be whiny. Also, I found he created a lot of his own problems. He doesn’t speak to his wife much about what’s troubling him and then he resentful when she doesn’t show him compassion. Instead he develops a crush and treads on thin ice, treading into affair territory. It just seems like a rash, childish move on his part. And it’s not like he has a big revelation where he realizes he’s been an idiot; at no point does he acknowledge that he was being foolish.
Overall, I didn’t mind reading this novel but I can’t say I’d read it again due to a lack of likable characters as well as the lengthy baseball chapters. I enjoy baseball and I understand that baseball was a big part of Nick’s character, but I found that the lengthy play-by-play chapters took me out of the story.
