Author: Stacey Lee

Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books

Release Date: December 27th 2016

Format: ARC

An evocative novel about a teen aroma expert who uses her extrasensitive sense of smell to mix perfumes that help others fall in love while protecting her own heart at all costs. Sometimes love is right under your nose. As one of only two aromateurs left on the planet, sixteen-year-old Mimosa knows what her future holds: a lifetime of weeding, mixing love elixirs, and matchmaking—all while remaining incurably alone. For Mim, the rules are clear: falling in love would render her nose useless, taking away her one great talent. Still, Mimosa doesn’t want to spend her life elbow-deep in soil and begonias. She dreams of a normal high school experience with friends, sports practices, debate club, and even a boyfriend. But when she accidentally gives an elixir to the wrong woman and has to rely on the lovesick woman’s son, the school soccer star, to help fix the situation, Mim quickly begins to realize that falling in love isn’t always a choice you can make. At once hopeful, funny, and romantic, Stacey Lee’s The Secret of a Heart Note is a richly evocative coming-of-age story that gives a fresh perspective on falling in love and finding one’s place in the world. 

Huge happy release day to The Secret of a Heart Note! If you didn't know, Stacey Lee is one of my favorite authors. She writes such fabulous diverse historical fiction and is definitely one of my auto-read authors. I was super interested in this book not only because it's Stacey Lee (haha duuuh) but also because it's different compared to her past two books. Going into the book, I was interested to see what was going to be different about it, but I knew that I was going to like it. Despite it's differences to her past works, I still really enjoyed this book.

One of the things I was super pleased about this book was how Stacey included diverse characters, which isn't surprising but it wasn't mentioned in the synopsis so I got a little concerned. I'm glad there are diverse characters though because having diversity in a book never ever ever hurts a book and it didn't affect the storyline. I also loved how this book talked about little about being lesbian and what that's like to deal with coming out and other people's judgment on that. The characters in this book are fabulous and I definitely wouldn't mind getting stories about some of the minor characters in this book! ;)

I also found the aromateaur aspect of the story really interesting because it's something that I've never seen or thought about before. I never considered smells being able to tell people about a person and how each person has a unique combination of smells. It was really interesting to read about something like that because it’s definitely different compared to other unique abilities I’ve read about. I definitely think it would be cool to detect lies or jealousy just by smell and something I wouldn't mind having for a temporary time period.

Overall though, I really enjoyed this book. It was definitely different compared to Stacey’s other books but that just shows how great of an author Stacey is. I would definitely recommend picking this book up for a lighter more fun of a read.