This is How It Starts by Dawn Lanuza

It's a crime that sub-par books like MILK AND HONEY get international acclaim while books like THIS IS HOW IT STARTS fly woefully under the radar. A crime, I tell you.

I'm slowly working my way through the #romanceclass books that are written by a group of Filipino authors, and one of the ones on my list that I haven't checked out yet was Dawn Lanuza. She's a Jane of All Trades when it comes to fiction, penning novellas and poetry, and I had purchased one of her novellas and her poems.

THIS IS HOW IT STARTS is a collection of poems about being in love and getting over heartbreak. I guess you could probably call this Tumblr poetry, only Lanuza actually uses punctuation correctly (and effectively) and she doesn't only write in lower-case. She is quite the artist, and unlike Rupi Kaur, she actually has a lot of talent, both with wordmarks and full-on illustrations. I loved them and wished there were more (did you design your own cover, too?).

There isn't much else to say about this book except that I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. Some of the poems are pretty basic but they are full of emotion, and there were a couple stand-out lines that I felt were really powerful. I could see these being paired with an electric guitar and being used as lyrics to a mid-2000s alternative rock band in the soundtrack of a good teen Disney movie. :)

3 to 3.5 out of 5 stars