The Bookish Mindset

Overview:

Title: Rebel Hearts
Author: Tanya Byrne
Published: July 2025
Genre: Romance
Themes: Found Family, Climate

One sentence summary: There’s two approaches to teaching about the climate, empathy or anarchy and Ren and Pearl are on opposite sides, but for how long?

One sentence review: A super sweet romance that fans of Tanya Byrne are going to eat up!

Review:

Ren and Pearl are teen environmental activists with ever so slightly different approaches. One is an online empathy driven method and the other centres action and maybe a little anarchy. 

After being held in a cell post protest they find themselves on the same farm all summer long. While their differences aren’t forgotten, they soon start to find common ground. 

Fans on Tanya Byrne are going to eat this up!  

Ren and Pearl are two young women trying to find their place in the world. This book is a beautiful journey of growth these two go on both separately and together, there’s so much growth there. They are young women trying to change and save the world in a society that keeps pushing back and that comes with a lot. My only other Tanya Byrne I’ve read is Afterlove (and what a book), but like that one you can really feel how much she loves her characters. 

The story was pacy and fun, never missing on depth and real meaning. The environmental crisis is an obvious theme here but there’s a lot these two go through with friends, family and found family too. In true Byrne fashion there’s plot and mischief that reveals itself as you go through, you may wonder early on and guess at its unravel and the ending is glorious and satisfying.

There’s some absolute corkers of quotes too: 

“And that’s how you start a revolution: one bored teenager at a time.”

“It’s only been one summer, but I want every season”

Let me know in the comments if you’re going to pick this one up?

If you’d like to get yourself a copy, you can support local bookshops while doing so on Bookshop.org with this link here.

If you like what you’ve read and would like to access more content, I’d love if you could take a look at my patreon and consider supporting my content on there too. You can also find more content on my Instagram here.

And don’t forget to check out my other blogs and reviews – you can find books with similar themes in the same folder link below, or click back onto blogs to see the whole offering.

Last updated 27/08/2025