Acquired Book By: I found out about this novel via The Write Reads who was hosting a blog tour in March, 2025. I read a sampler of the novel online and found it such a compelling story. I knew I wanted to read the novel in full and marked myself down to host a review. I was able to purchase a copy of the novel about a week and a half ahead of the blog tour and I was wicked happy I was able to feature the novel for the tour.
Thereby, this is a self-purchase of mine and I was not obligated to post a review. I am sharing my ruminative thoughts for my own edification and for continuing to share my readerly life on Jorie Loves A Story. I did not receive compensation for my opinions or thoughts shared herein.
Why I found this story to be a harder read than I expected it to be:
I have had a keen interest in reading more Children’s Lit over the years – which is why I developed my own concentrated readathon over the Summer, which I refer to as #MyYASummer. This past Summer, I made strides towards accomplishing that very goal (see also Post) – of reading a healthy array of YA Lit over the months of Summer but I was unable to finish reading the stories I had begun. This year, I’m doubling down and will start sooner than I had last year – all whilst, in the months leading into June, I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for #newtomeauthors of Young Adult novels which are featuring the types of stories I’d love to be reading right now. I have a penchant for Indie Authors – as I’ve long been a champion of Indies since I first started as a book blogger in this community in (2013). I also actively read Middle Grade Fiction, too.
I truly felt this was going to be a good fit for me as a reader – which is why I elected to be on the blog tour and choose to purchase a copy of the novel in order to read it for the tour itself. However, as you will find throughout my review – there were grave disappointments for me as reader who struggled to come to terms with where the author’s initial framework for the novel led me to believe it was going in one particular direction and then, took a much darker path entirely and wrecked the story for me. I earmarked what went wrong and what I believe are warnings in content for sensitive readers who might want to know what is inclusive of the story ahead of reading it for themselves. I know those help me a lot as I navigate stories to read and am grateful for book bloggers who discuss them on their own reviews.
This story might not have the same effect on someone else and they might not feel as dearly shattered at the end of reading the novel like I had either. Stories affect us in different ways and we each experience a novel differently. What suits one of us, might not suit the rest of us and vice versa. Being a finalist in the BBNYA, I know this story already found a strong audience and that readers resonated with the story as it was told. For me, it just fell short and left me wanton for an ending which matched better with the foundation Reed had established earlier on in the novel.
My Heart is Hurting
Source: Purchased | Personal Library
Jinny Buffett is lonely…
She’s never had the comfort of a white picket fence with a loving family. Her subsidized apartment in Hollywood Florida echoes with the void of her dead Daddy, and the nights drag long into twilight while her Mama works the block outside the Margaritaville resort.
It’s idealistic Ms. Fleming, who’s brave enough to come knocking first. She wants to see Jinny rise up and use her ace scores to escape the wheel of poverty, convincing Jinny to start a school book club, where she finds the friends and boyfriend she never knew she needed.
But when her Mama spirals out of control and threatens her entire existence, it’s Jinny’s Everglade ancestors who arrive in a mist of magic, bringing the swamp and hope with them.
Places to find the book:
ISBN: 9781958531259
Published by Wild Ink Publishing
on 16th July, 2023
Format: POD | Print On Demand Paperback
Pages: 180
Published by: Wild Ink Publishing (@wild_ink_publishing) via Instagram
My review of “My Heart is Hurting”:
Jinny has a hard time seeing the good in people, which is why she was turnt off by the fact her teacher had sought her out at her home rather than speaking to her at school. She didn’t want the teacher’s sympathies or pity and she definitely didn’t want to be chosen to create a club at school. For Jinny, blending into the background of her life was safer than standing out. Until the day came along and she realised that sometimes you have to take chances on people and see if they are worth the risk to your heart. Jinny’s school is like so many school environments – from the bullies to the bullied, you can recognise the usual suspects at her school and realise the trauma they give the other kids by their words and behaviours. Yet, aside from those characters – there are a few good ones, too. Like Jinny, Thomas and Victor (the latter of whom was a surprise as he plays football and usually those sorts tend to follow the crowd; not always but typically so) who were starting to have their paths cross with each other with the creation of Jinny’s Book Club.
Whilst Jinny isn’t at school – we enter her home life and find that her mother is more absent than present and cares for her own affairs than raising Jinny. It is hard to read about such a selfless mother in Jinny’s life – as the girl has so much to give the world and her family, but she doesn’t have a parent in her life who cares enough about her in return. It is quite sad to oversee her hours at home and know that she has it harder than most in her school. Especially as the only solace she has is a secreted kitten in her room. Jinny knows about food insecurity and food scarcity – where none of her meals are guaranteed or even regular. On top of which, she’s going through puberty and all her Mom can think about is what that can give her out in the real world as she sees it and not helping her daughter have better self-confidence, body positivity and self-esteem. With Jinny’s mother it was more of a selfish interest in her daughter than a motherly one.
I was curious about when the story was going to shift a bit as the synopsis left a curious note about how Jinny’s Everglades ancestors were going to swoop into her life at some point which left me wicked eager to find their emerging presence in her life. And, right as I was noting they hadn’t yet made their presence known – something magical happened to Jinny. Her father’s spirit came to her one night and couldn’t want to see how more of her family were going to intercede on her behalf from there. This is where the novel turnt into being quite realistically magical (ie. Magical Realism) as this otherwordly presence was intercepting into Jinny’s everyday world and life. It didn’t take long for this ‘otherness’ in her life to fully overtake her and give her a lasting impression of that ‘other place’ too. So much so, she felt as if she truly had transported herself back into the Everglades – a place that was lore for her in reality but held so much of her heart.
It was these elements of Magical Realism which truly touched my heart and left my imagination wanting to live within those short passages of the story longer. Especially as Reed started to curate this wicked wonderful space where Jinny and her relatives could engage with each other in a very special and personal way. I thought the story was moving in a particular direction – as I felt these shifts in time and perception were leading into a different kind of ending. One which would have been centred on hope, family and healing. Instead, I was most distressed by how suddenly the story altered in front of me and Jinny’s life derailed quite extremely into areas I hadn’t foreseen happening. Reed did showcase how Jinny’s life was arduously difficult for her younger years and how her mother would constantly abandon her for different lengths of time but nothing quite prepared me for the fuller revelations and reveals which were yet to come.
I applauded Reed for showing us how Jinny was letting go of her barriers and insecurities around peers her own age as much as she was starting to trust the adults in her life more outside of her mother and her mother’s friend. It showed her maturity and her courage to take control of her own life. Those moments she spent with her friends – at their homes showed how she could root herself in normalcy and find her own path towards redeeming the years she had lost with her mother’s abusive parenting. Those friends showed her a different way of life and a path forward from harm.
Where I struggled to connect with Reed’s vision for Jinny’s story is what happens after her mother returns home. From the moment her mother goes to the school to yank her daughter out and to force her to relocate away from this newfound way of life which was giving Jinny wings of hope for her future – that is where the story took too many left turns for me as a reader. Emotionally I was not prepared for it all either – her mother turnt out to be quite the evil character and one who was far more menacing than I first realised possible. I felt Reed was trying too hard to sell me on the hardships in Jinny’s life at that point and went over the top in giving us an ending that was just too extreme to be believable. I would have respected the story more if her relatives from the Everglades had shown up and taken custody of Jinny rather than the way story actually concluded. For me, that was how I felt all the groundwork was being laid down for us to believe – to have her relatives so far removed from her life step into the forefront and reclaim their grand-daughter and niece.
I did finish reading this novel but at the conclusion of it – it left a sour note on my heart and mind. I didn’t enjoy a lot of the last half of the novel – except for a few moments here or there. I felt there were a lot of moments in the context of the story which were overly written and explained whilst not owning to the story already told. Personally, there was too much added drama, angst and violence at the latter quarter of the novel for me to reconcile too. Even when Pearl left Jinny’s life, I felt was too cruel to be kind. (Pearl was her cat) I also had a lot of issues with the excessive vulgarity and the choices of when those stronger words were used as it was just overkill for me. Overall, I am left with regret because the story I was reading and hoping to see come to an ending that made sense to me as I read it just fell short of those expectations and left me questioning how the story could go wrong so fast and so hard. By wrong, I mean, the fact that I felt Reed put too much into Jinny’s life at the end of the story which just didn’t feel warranted to have happened by the way in which she set the tone for it during the first half of the novel. I will say reading this novel shatters your heart and leaves you wary.
Personally, I sort of wished her mother could have just disappeared entirely and that her Everglades family had just appeared out of the ethers of the swamps and embraced her with love and acceptance and carted her back to South Florida to have a much healthier life and upbringing. She deserved to have that – she needed to have that. In the end, where Jinny ends up isn’t what I wanted for her at all. She doesn’t have family around her, and I felt she was evermore on her own than she was during the entire length of the novel. It just didn’t sit well with me. Plus, Reed gave her a therapist who really didn’t understand Jinny at all and that rankled me too. In short, this novel just wasn’t my cuppa tea and just didn’t work for me as a reader.
On the writing styling of S.E. Reed:
Reed has a very provocative voice in (Upper) Young Adult Fiction – holding back nothing from her readers, she gives you a hardened glimpse into the difficult lives her characters are living with bold honesty and an authentic voice. She tucks you close to her lead character Jinny and the story is rooted in her perspective of high school – from her social interactions with her peers to her quieter considerations of life after high school and the everyday chaos that has become her life with an absent parent in her mother. She opening discusses abandonment in the story – as Jinny has to deal with the fact she’s living on her own whilst her mother is away at ‘work’ for a week to two weeks at a time. It also puts into question how a child is parenting her mother rather than the mother parenting the child as Jinny is the responsible one in her family. This plays out in different ways and Reed does an excellent job of showcasing how Jinny has to be more of an adult than a teenager.
The beauty of how Reed intuits out the otherworldly presences of Jinny’s Everglades family is quite unique – it is part ethereal and dreamy with a paranormal twist to it. I loved how she let us feel what Jinny felt in those moments – experiencing it as if we were Jinny herself and feeling the gravity of those moments every inch as Jinny too. Where the swamp merged into Jinny’s living hours was beautifully crafted and visualised.
Topics Discussed in the Story:
→ Body Image & Identity
→ Food Insecurity and Instability
→ Poverty and Low-Income Housing
→ Bullies and the Bullied
→ Being an accelerated learner
One of the best bits to the story was how Reed wanted to paint a light on Jinny’s living environments – how she fused the realities of Jinny’s world into the backbone of the novel. From the truth about her mother and father (as both of them led questionable lives in regard to work and how they provided for Jinny) to the housing situation Jinny had with her mother. She also shined a light on what it like to live with food insecurity and instability as much as the difficulties of being an accelerated learner in a family who didn’t put any weight on education.
Small Fly in the Ointment:
I had a feeling this novel might push my limits for strong language, and it didn’t take long for the language to almost become too much of an issue for me to finish reading the story. Except to say, there was something about Jinny and Thomas which kept me rooted to the pages and yearning to know more about them. Reed has a very emotional style of narrative – sans the language issue and gives you a heartful reason to feel anchoured to her characters. So much so, I wish she had relied less on the vulgarity to become so dearly peppered into the dialogue and just remained clued into the heart and soul of her characters instead.
I realise teenagers do use stronger words to express themselves and I’m aging myself a bit by saying when I was in high school in the mid-90s they didn’t lean as hard on those words as they do today. Needless, I still stand by the fact that some stories can handle these inclusions of stronger words but at one point, this story was adding to much of it to make sense after a while. Here and there, yes, it was a given those words were warranted or at least made sense but then, for me the words just felt like they tipped the story the wrong way and left it a bit unbalanced between what you could accept and what could be considered overboard with usage.
For this particular reason and the obstacles Jinny was facing in her life – I felt this was better suited to being classified as an Upper YA Fiction release rather than traditionally classed as YA. Even moreso to be Upper YA for the last quarter of the novel where everything takes a decidedly different turn in the novel.
Content Warnings:
Although Jinny’s mother is emotionally and psychologically abusive, we don’t fully understand why she is treating her daughter like this until nearly the last chapter of the novel. I felt that was a misstep as well on behalf of the author as she wasn’t allowing us to peer into Jinny’s life with open eyes and understanding about the mental health issues her mother was facing until it was too late to receive that information. Also, there is a hostage situation in the story as well as physical violence and a piercingly real car accident that might have a trigger effect on someone who has survived a brutal crash in their life. There is mention of drugs – mostly for a downstairs neighbour who smokes weed to control the pain for her Cancer but there are mentions of other drugs in the story but not directly seen in the story. Anxiety and PTSD are also components of the story but are not explained early enough in the timeline of the novel and felt rather abrupt once they were disclosed.
I prefer novels which set the foundations for these disclosures from start to finish – where you aren’t blindsided by their disclosures in the context of the novel itself, and you have a better understand of how they affect the character or characters’ lives because you took that journey with them rather than be ‘told’ about it all after the fact. Which I felt was my greatest disappointment with My Hurt is Hurting – it told too much at the end and flipped the script on a story which was moving into a different direction than it led me to believe it would go.
This book review is courtesy of the blog tour by The Write Reads:
Be sure to follow this lovely blog tour socially and in the book blogosphere!
You will find posts on different platforms –
including the ones I’m active on myself which are #bookstagram and BlueSky.
{SOURCES: Cover art of “My Heart is Hurting”, book synopsis, author biography and photo as well as the BBNYA badge and blog tour banner were provided by The Write Reads and are used with permission. Post dividers by Fun Stuff for Your Blog via Pure Imagination. Blog graphics created by Jorie via Canva: Children’s Lit banner and the Comment Box Banner.}
Copyright © Jorie Loves A Story, 2025.
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