Review: How to Hack a Heartbreak

Title: How to Hack a Heartbreak
Author: Kristin Rockaway
Genre: Romance, Contemporary
Publisher: Graydon House
Source: Publisher via NetGalley
Format: Ebook
Release Date: July 30, 2019
Rating: ★★★★★

Goodreads Synopsis:

Swipe right for love. Swipe left for disaster.

By day, Mel Strickland is an underemployed helpdesk tech at a startup incubator, Hatch, where she helps entitled brogrammers—”Hatchlings”—who can’t even fix their own laptops, but are apparently the next wave of startup geniuses. And by night, she goes on bad dates with misbehaving dudes she’s matched with on the ubiquitous dating app, Fluttr.

But after one dick pic too many, Mel has had it. Using her brilliant coding skills, she designs an app of her own, one that allows users to log harrassers and abusers in online dating space. It’s called JerkAlert, and it goes viral overnight.

Mel is suddenly in way over her head. Worse still, her almost-boyfriend, the dreamy Alex Hernandez—the only non-douchey guy at Hatch—has no idea she’s the brains behind the app. Soon, Mel is faced with a terrible choice: one that could destroy her career, love life, and friendships, or change her life forever.

Review:

Melanie Strickland works at the help desk for a company that works with startup companies. She is surrounded with men who don’t think she knows how to do her job. Even when she’s not at work, she encounters horrible men on the popular dating app, Fluttr. Melanie decides to make her own website to alert women to the disgusting men on Fluttr, so she creates JerkAlert. However, the start up entrepreneur who she starts dating, Alex, appears on her website. Melanie has to hide her identity as the founder of JerkAlert while also navigating her own relationship with Alex.

This story tackles sexism in the workplace. Melanie was treated horribly by the men in her office, and her male supervisors didn’t see a problem with it. It was actually upsetting to read at times, because the things they did and said were so inappropriate.

Even though Melanie had to deal with sexist men, she turned her life around. She worked very hard to push past the limitations that men put on her in the digital coding world just because she was a woman.

I really enjoyed this story.

Thank you Graydon House Books for providing a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

What to read next:

Have you read How to Hack a Heartbreak? What did you think of it?