BOTM Monday: The Heartbreak Hotel

Author: Ellen O'Clover Title: The Heartbreak Hotel Publisher: Berkley Date Published: 09/23/2025

Read Dates: 09/20/2025- 09/21/2025
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

This was my Book of the Month club pick for September. 

The Heartbreak Hotel is a single POV women’s fiction novel about grief and healing with a romance focused plot. When Louisa’s relationship ends the only thing she really wants is to keep the beautiful house they were renting together, but she can’t afford it on her own. She convinces her landlord, Henry, to let her convert it into a bed & breakfast, a safe haven for the heartbroken to come and heal. She finds herself drawn to Henry, who has his own grief to deal with, but life’s complications and unshared secrets might end things before a new beginning can take root.

I thought this book was beautiful and emotional. I feel like it might have been mislabeled as a romance because, while there is a romance storyline, at its heart this book is about grief and healing. I’ve added this authors other works to my TBR, I want to experience more of her storytelling.

A bed-and-breakfast for the brokenhearted might hold the key to another chance at love in this achingly hopeful debut romance.

Louisa Walsh emerged from a tumultuous childhood with a degree in counseling, a wealthy boyfriend, and her sunny outlook on life mostly intact. But that optimism is tested when she’s dumped and left unable to afford rent on their gorgeous house in the mountains of Colorado. Even with her life in disarray, Lou knows losing the one stable place she’s ever called home is not an option.

She asks her reclusive landlord, Henry Rhodes, to let her stay for free in exchange for renting out the house’s many rooms as a bed-and-breakfast. She’s shocked when he agrees to her terms, and even more surprised to discover Henry is a handsome thirtysomething veterinarian with silver at his temples and sadness in his eyes. One who does not take it well when Lou starts marketing her B and B as a retreat for the recently heartbroken.

But as the Comeback Inn opens its doors to its weary, hopeful guests, Lou and Henry find themselves dancing around both their undeniable connection and the closely held secrets that threaten to topple this fragile new start. A chance at love, here, could be too close to home…or it could be exactly where their hearts finally heal.