This is a collected edition of the "Heartbreak Soup" stories, which have themselves been collected in smaller individual volumes, all of which I've read and reviewed - this, then, gets the average rating of those volumes. An easy calculation to make, given that they all got three stars from me.

I frequently like them, but I'm just as often confused by them. This is a hugely ambitious series, sprawling and complex, and it feels like there's a cast of hundreds. It's further complicated by the fact that it jumps back and forth in time, so sometimes it feels like a giant jigsaw, or mosaic, that I have to put together. I have to admit that I frequently find myself wishing that there were fewer characters, so it would be easier to sort out who's who, and who is related to who, instead of always having to flip back and forth to the cheat sheets, but if there were fewer characters, the series wouldn't have that same sense of amazing depth and sprawl. Palomar feels like a genuine community, rather than a story with a crowd backdrop, if that makes sense. 

I don't always enjoy it, and I don't always understand it, but I do find it interesting, and that's enough.