I am in love. 
 I'm having a very similar reaction to this book as I had to Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell. Both are about flawed characters, who you both loathe and love. Both are about the intense and painful nature of first loves. Both hurt and heal in equal measures. Both made me feel like my heart was breaking. 
 Ed is self-centred and arrogant, with an obsession with childhood and a refusal to accept any responsibility for his actions. Min is pretentious with too much dramatic flare, simultaneously insisting she doesn't care how others view her and yet continuously defining herself by their terms. Why We Broke Up supports the adage that characters do not have to be likeable to make a book worthwhile. Min and Ed are both intensely dislikable, probably because they remind us a little too much what it's like to be 17 and confused and desperately lonely. To me, this makes their story much more important, because I think we can all see a little (maybe a little too much) of ourselves in either Ed or Min, or maybe both. 
 Maira Kalman's simplistic and evocative art was a perfect match to Daniel Handler's stream of consciousness writing style. I found the start hard to get into, but the last forty or so pages were so beautiful they more than made up for it. It's not a perfect work but it's pretty damn close, if you are willing to look past the expectation of likeable characters and look at it as a documentation of human faults.