Yes I Cried on Public Transit, No I Won’t Discuss It

The jar of hearts, and why I braced for it

Here’s the setup. Rune Kristiansen moves from Oslo to a small town in Georgia when he is five, and the girl next door, Poppy Litchfield, decides on the spot that he is hers. They grow up tangled together. Poppy’s grandmother gives her the idea that will run the whole book: collect a thousand kisses, one folded paper heart for each, and keep them in a jar. It is impossibly sweet. It is the kind of premise that either lands you or makes you roll your eyes so hard you strain something.

Then life does the thing life does in books like this. Rune’s family moves back to Norway. Two years pass. He comes home a different, colder boy, furious that Poppy went quiet on him. And Poppy is carrying a secret that anyone who has read the back cover already knows and anyone who hasn’t should probably be allowed to discover on their own, so I’ll leave it mostly alone.

I went in guarded. I genuinely did. I have a low tolerance for the sick-teen-romance industrial complex, where a diagnosis gets deployed like a cheat code for feelings the writing didn’t earn. So bear with me while I explain why I put my guard down anyway.

What it does well, and the parts I want to argue with

Tillie Cole understands one thing better than almost anyone working this lane: the ache of the reunion. The best stretch of this book is the middle, where Poppy and Rune are back in the same town and he is being an absolute glacier to her and you, the reader, know precisely why she is letting him. That gap between what he thinks is happening and what is actually happening is where the whole book lives, and it is genuinely painful in the good way. I read most of it in one sitting on my couch with a cold cup of tea I forgot about entirely, and when I finally looked up it was dark outside and I was annoyed at myself and also not sorry.

Rune himself is a bit of a type. Brooding Scandinavian boy, black clothes, a camera always around his neck, cheekbones you could open mail with. If you have read any new-adult romance you have met a cousin of his. But Cole does something smart: she lets him be genuinely unlikeable in the middle section. He is cruel to Poppy in ways that are hard to read, and the book doesn’t rush to excuse it. That patience is the difference between this working and this being a greeting card.

Now the argument. Poppy is almost too good. She is patient and radiant and self-sacrificing to a degree that made me, at times, want to shake her. The book asks you to love her the way everyone in the book loves her, and I did, but I also caught myself wishing she had one genuinely ugly, selfish, human moment. Grief is not dignified. This Poppy is dignified nearly the whole way through, and it costs the book a little truth.

And look, I have to say the obvious thing. This is a book engineered to make you cry. The last third pulls every lever, and it pulls them hard, and it does not care about your composure. There is a scene near the end involving that jar, and the counting of the hearts, that is so nakedly designed to destroy you that part of my brain was standing off to the side going “oh, you absolute manipulator” even as the rest of me was gone. I cried. On public transit, actually, the second time I reread it, which is the tangent I promised myself I’d include: I had brought it to reread on a train because I thought I was immune the second time. I was not immune. A man across the aisle offered me a tissue. I have never recovered from the indignity.

Is that a flaw or the whole point? I genuinely go back and forth. A book that sets out to make you sob and succeeds has done its job. But a book that only works because of the job it does, and would collapse if the diagnosis were removed, is standing on one leg. This one is standing on one very sturdy leg.

The prose is functional. Plainly written, occasionally overwrought, sometimes reaching for a poetic register it doesn’t quite have the muscle to hold. If you need sentence-level beauty, this is not that. It is a book that works on structure and premise and the sheer relentless sincerity of the thing, not on the line.

Sincerity is the most disarming trick a book has, because you cannot roll your eyes and feel it at the same time, and this book bets everything on your eyes losing.

About Tillie Cole

Tillie Cole is a British author (Teesside, in the northeast of England) who has bounced across a startling range of romance registers. This is the woman who also wrote the very dark, very not-for-the-faint-of-heart Hades Hangmen MC series, which is about as far from folded paper hearts as you can get. That range is the interesting thing about her. She can write brutal and she can write tender, and A Thousand Boy Kisses is her going for the throat with tenderness instead. She spent time living in Australia and the US, which shows up in the easy way she writes an American small town from an outsider’s eye. She is prolific, she is comfortable in indie and hybrid publishing, and she clearly is not precious about genre respectability, which I respect enormously.

If this wrecked you, read these next

• Me Before You by Jojo Moyes. The grown-up, sharper-written sibling of this book. Same emotional endgame, more wit, more edges.
• The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. The obvious one, but obvious for a reason. Funnier, more self-aware about the sick-teen genre it lives in.
• All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven. If it was the doomed-young-love ache you were chasing, not specifically the illness, this hits a similar nerve.
• Ugly Love by Colleen Hoover. If you want the same emotional-devastation-as-a-feature approach with a spicier, more adult register.

For your book club

1. Did the terminal-illness premise feel earned to you, or did it feel like a shortcut to emotion the story hadn’t built on its own?
2. Rune is genuinely cruel to Poppy in the middle. Did the book do enough to make you forgive him, or did it forgive him too easily?
3. Poppy is almost saintly. Would the book be stronger or weaker if she’d been allowed to be selfish, bitter, or ugly in her grief?
4. The jar of a thousand hearts is the emotional engine of the whole book. Did it work on you as a symbol, or did it tip into being too much?
5. Is a book that is deliberately designed to make you cry doing something valuable, or something manipulative? Can it be both at once?

Three and a half. Not because it isn’t powerful, it is, but because the power comes almost entirely from one enormous emotional swing and not enough from the writing around it, and I have to be honest even about the books that made me cry on a train in front of a kind stranger with a tissue.