Lessons in Heartbreak focuses on the lives of three women, spanning three generations, and the joy and heartbreak they experience in love, marriage and motherhood. It’s for readers of Mills & Boon that are all grown up and asking, what comes after ‘happily ever after’?

Izzie is a beautiful Irish woman living in New York, approaching her forties and proud of her full figure. She works in a model agency and dreams of starting her own agency for larger women. The dream goes out the window when she meets Joe, a man on the verge of separating from his wife. Joe is an ‘alpha male’, that cliché of the romance novel world: super rich, super powerful and super hunky.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Izzie’s aunt Anneliese is bewildered when her husband of thirty years leaves her for her best friend. Anneliese has suffered from long-term depression that she has tried to shield her family from. She discovers that, instead of protecting her family, she has driven them away. Her daughter, Beth, has unknowingly become callous and dismissive of her mother’s feeling, and has no idea about her mother’s suffering. The loneliness that Anneliese suffers is compounded by her knowledge that, at her age, she will likely never fall in love again.

As the novel progresses, there are flashbacks to World War Two, when Izzie’s grandmother Lily was a young nurse. She is working class and Catholic, and falls in love with a married man from the upper classes.

By contrasting these three women, Kelly explores the complexities of infidelity. Class divides are no longer a factor in preventing marriage, at least in Western societies, but Lily’s affair illustrates that while circumstances have changed, it’s still the same heartbreak. Izzie struggles with the modern epidemic of divorce, and whether it is right to take a man away from his family.

While readers will identify with Izzie, it is Anneliese and Lily that have the complexity to make Lessons an interesting story. The chapters focusing on Izzie and Joe lack chemistry, and the obstructions in their path to true love are flimsy. Joe is reluctant to depart the family home in case it has a negative effect on his children (strapping lads of 12, 14 and 23). He has no compunction about repeatedly cheating on his wife, however. Joe comes off as just another man who wants his cake and eats it too.

Many will agree that divorce is a regrettable outcome of a marriage. Kelly clearly takes a dim view of the subject and subtly casts Izzie in the role of home wrecker that must come to her senses and save Joe from himself. The message that the reader takes away from this scenario is an uncomfortable one: it is better for children to be lied to and be kept in a loveless home than to suffer a divorce.

Anneliese never resolves the difficulties she has with her daughter. Beth becomes pregnant and Anneliese is anxious not to upset the mother-to-be with her own problems, furthering the idea that procreation trumps all.

While children are seen and not heard in this novel, there are underlying currents that reveal much about Kelly’s values: children are a sort of Holy Grail in a woman’s life, and to miss out on childbearing is to fail as a woman, despite any other achievements throughout life.

An already slow pace throughout the novel is made worse by constant repetition, which was probably put in for effect, but leaves the reader feeling frustrated and bored. One wonders if the editor who was given the task of wrestling the book into shape was so impressed by Kelly’s bestseller status that she was too terrified to change a thing. This is unfortunate, as Lessons in Heartbreak could have been an engaging and entertaining book if someone had bothered to rein it in.