Only Love Can Break Your Heart is a young adult novel coming of age story about Reiko, a Southern California teenager entering her junior year of high school. She's recently mostly recovered from a long depression after the death of her older sister Miko, who Reiko keeps seeing and interacting with. Reiko starts to befriend Seth, sort of a loner young man and not a popular kid like Reiko and her friends.

Secretly they share a friendship but the secretiveness eventually strains their relationship and then Reiko kisses another boy and breaks Seth's trust. We enter the last part of the book where Reiko tries to win Seth back and starts to realize how much she abused him in small ways but then once Seth changes Reiko starts to realize maybe Seth had his own issues too.

Eventually it comes back to Miko and Reiko's relationship with the rest of her family: mom and dad and younger brother. And the only way for Reiko to repair herself and those relationships is to finally come to grip with Miko's death and say goodbye...

It's an 8-hour audio book read by Cristina Vee. It's sort of slow moving and placid yet interesting. It's not melodrama so the fact that Reiko and Seth never really reconcile is more like "that's how life is sometimes". Overall I did enjoy it though I'm way out of the target audience.