A review by e_reader124
Your Heart, My Sky: Love in a Time of Hunger by Margarita Engle

2.0

This could have been so much better. It had the potential, but there were many times where it missed the mark. First of all, the story just didn't have a whole lot to it, was structured so weirdly, and felt like a whole bunch of nothing. I think it was due to the fact that the book was written in verse. This was a story that needed lots of time to fully flesh out, such as in full novel form. Because of the in verse format, it was very rushed, disproportionately structured, and badly paced. The plot went in a million different random directions and very little truly meaningful things happen. I also found myself extremely bored a lot because it was very wordy. This all affected the romance itself because it didn't feel genuine or deserved. It took about ten poems for Liana and Amado to get together, and it all felt so random and rushed because of the gaps. Heck, even their acquainticeship felt so rushed and random because of these gaps. I did like the depiction of the time period, though. The setting of 1991 Cuba felt very genuine and well written and researched. It genuinely felt like a first person account of the time period. The accurate depiction of the time period was one of the few things that kept me interested in this book. The characters were also pretty well-written. They are very three-dimensional, and you understand them, like what they want, what they feel, what they've been through, etc. Finally, on a more downer note, I wasn't a big fan of the ending. It felt very empty and unfulfilled, and it was ended extremely abruptly. When I finished the last page and saw the author's note next, I was like, "That's it?". It could have benefitted from at least an extra couple pages, something to wrap up the story more neatly. Overall, this ended up being pretty bland, but it could've been really great if it had been written in a different format.