François Lelord

A young French psychiatrist continues to explore the mysteries of the human soul, currently focusing his attention on love, while his beloved, Clara, makes her own similar investigations in this latest installment of the internationally best-selling series. Original. 100,000 first printing.

A Novel

Hector and the Secrets of Love

As much a love story as a novel about love, "Hector and the Secrets of Love" is a feel-good life manual wrapped in a globetrotting adventure, told with the blend of a fairy tale's nave wisdom and a satirist's dry wit that has won Hector fans around the world.

Domenico Di Leo

Usually men do not like to read about love, however since I enjoyed the previous book “Hector and the search for Happiness” I picked this one up. While I find the previous book a serious attempt to investigate the secrets of happiness, this time, the book focuses on Hector’s personal love life and it is not that interesting. Also Hector is not engaging or likable as in the previous book and I must say that I struggled to finish it.

Anna Ureta

This was more of a break filler book between everything I’ve been reading – I honestly didn’t think I’d get to reading this book, but here we are.
 Very similar to the first novel, Hector and the Search for Happiness, the story follows Hector’s story as he searches for the secret to love and the components of love. Love is a very complicated thing so I’m surprised they managed to put it in a book.
 This book gives a unique insight to love and notes about love but I wouldn’t take them too much to heart, perhaps use them as references if at all.

Hector is a psychiatrist and has noticed that a lot of his patients come to him about love – how to find it, how to get over it, how to keep it, how to deal with it.
 After being invited to a pharmaceutical meeting, he is sent on a journey to find a professor that’s currently studying love and how to bottle it into a drug. He believes love can make people happy, and the company believes this will be something that people will spend money on. But Hector believes that love is more complicated than people can understand, however he is interested in people’s views and perspectives of it.

First, this book is a lovely follow-up and addition to the series, however, I feel like perhaps it lost its lackluster in comparison to the first novel.
 There was something magical about it, like someone reading the book to a child for a bedtime story, told in a very innocent tone that was calm and soothing. This book has that same similar tone but just different – not as whimsical as the first novel.
 It definitely made a lot of good points that were backed by science (although how accurate the science is, I don’t know since I’m not a science major), but it seemed pretty cohesive to me.

Hector spoke about the five components of heartbreak as well, which I won’t talk about because spoilers, but it isn’t until the very end that the components of heartbreak, which seem negative, are turned into a more positive light.

Overall the story was very interesting and did shed a certain light about the aspects of love and what love could mean to some people, but it’s hard to really have an opinion when you remember that this book is fiction, even if it was written by a psychiatrist turned author. I get what message he’s trying to relay but love is so complex that I don’t think it’s something you can explain and bottle in a book.

This book was still entertaining and was easy to follow – a quick read, and somewhat informative.
 It was a good filler book but I wouldn’t put too much stock in it or take the book too seriously.

3/5 Hearts of Love

Hector and the Secrets of Love A Novel

Reviews