Our Chemical Hearts explores grief, first love and redemption. And while these are themes that I love reading about, my biggest struggle with the novel was the plot. I found it to be extremely boring and for a good 150-200 pages, I had no idea where the book was going or what it intended to do. I wasn’t interested in anything that was happening and I never really got into the story. Ultimately, the book did redeem itself with its last 50 pages and I really enjoyed how realistic the book was, but it was a case of too little, too late. However, I really must emphasis how much I liked how the themes of grief and first love were explored at the end of this book because that was what made me increase my rating by at least one star. I thought it was realistic and thought-provoking, and a nice change from other similar contemporary stories that I’ve read. It was just a bit unfortunate that I never got into the book and it was pretty much a race to the end for me.