Love Hurts by Malorie Blackman
Genre: Anthology, Romance
Published by: Corgi Childrens
Pages: 576
Format: ebook
Rating: ★★★
Where to Find: Goodreads | Amazon

Love Hurts is a collection of excerpts and short stories from popular authors that you’ve probably heard of before!
Here’s the list: Malorie Blackman, Maureen Johnson, Catherine Johnson, Philip Pullman, James Dawson, Jenny Downham, Patrick Ness, E. Lockhart, Lauren Myracle, Laura Dockrill, Gayle Forman, Markus Zusak, Susie Day, David Levithan, Lauren Kate, Tabitha Suzuma, Andrew Smith, Marcus Sedgwick, Bali Rai, Non Prat, Matt Haig, Phil Earle and Melvin Burgess.

The introduction by Malorie Blackman was the perfect way to set up the anthology, and I’ll probably quote it somewhere in my EPQ project about First Love in YA. It’s such a great idea to have a collection of excerpts, because it made me really interested to pick up some of my favourite stories. It was also a wonderful opportunity to sample authors that I hadn’t read yet!

It was fun to revisit stories that I’ve already read with the focus being on the romance, rather than an supernatural or mystery elements that are present in the full novels. If anything this book would be an excellent gift to any one who is perhaps hesitant to read, or isn’t a big reader, because it means they’ll get to sample so many different authors and they might find one they love! Maddie and I have had More Than This, The Infinite Moment of Us, and Trouble on our TBRs for quite a while, so whilst we skipped those stories in case of spoilers – which I’d say is possibly the only down side of an excerpts anthology – the others were devoured quickly!

Before reading Love Hurts I hadn’t read any Malorie Blackman, even though she is one of the most celebrated young adult authors, and this has definitely changed my mind, and I will be hunting down her other stories extremely soon!