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“Bleeding Hearts” (2018, Royalty Books) is 33-year-old Tendai Makaripe’s well-timed word of advice for the youths in matters of dating and courtship, thus from some point of view it plays the long-forgotten cultural role of the aunt who used to handle such issues.

The author is deeply concerned with young people whom we see in daylight “carousing” in what they think is love. We see them – a very young generation falling for short-lived wonderland in which they have gone mad in the contest to please their beloveds with body and fashion – and only when things fall apart do they awaken to the real world!

Makaripe’s book shames the myth of “love” for today’s young people but also, in a hidden way, takes the adults on board. Lust and infatuation has replaced true love.

What has lacked in young people is education about the subject of dating and courtship, and to get them to read books like “Bleeding Hearts” would help inspire them to value patience and the dignity of their bodies and future. Adults who should be educating them have also become blinded and we daily are burdened by news of murders, suicides, many horrific incidents of husbands and wives failing to handle their heartbreaks or emotions in their marriages.

Dr Patson Dzamara, a senior motivational writer in Zimbabwe, has also handled this crucial subject of relationships in his book “Dear Miss and Mister”. And young Makaripe seem to take a cue from his seniors as he delivers his message through narrative and report explained from viewpoints of world-renowned writers, theologists and scientists.

Some local readers rate motivational writings as sterile and boring but the truth is that not all of it is unimaginative.

The new writers in this field are getting innovative and becoming worthwhile to read. One can prove they are heading for a scoop of a large part of the readership cake!

“Bleeding Hearts”, though it seems to rely on wide “outsourcing” to support its arguments, is imbued with a certain wisdom of its own in only six chapters closing with a choir of five poems.

The poems echo with the hurt and regret of a broken heart, yet reminding the reader that true love can only be found in God and God-knowing humans, and that if this true spirit leads, nothing and no one breaks.

This book however shares some common issues written already by senior writers like Dr Dzamara in his book “Dear Miss and Mister”, published three years ago.

How exciting it is to also discover a coincidence in the two books’ fourth chapters dealing with the same issue. One of sub-topics tackled in Dr Dzamara’s Chapter 4 is “Not All That Glitters is Gold” and the whole of Makaripe’s Chapter 4 rolls under “All That Glitters is Not Gold”, both topics explicating, in different approaches, the mistake most people make of valuing outward adornment more than the inner person.

What Dr Dzamara captures in a brief, simplified yet sound manner, Makaripe deepens it with engaging Biblical detail to confirm its truth.

In “Bleeding Hearts”, he describes Sodom, before God destroyed it, as a paradise as lovely as Eden before God condemned it also and yet in all the earlier glitters in these places, as Makaripe quotes the words of international writer Ellen White, “ . . . lurked the destroyer, watching for his prey”.

“Some young people are in the wrong relationships today because they wanted the glitz and glamour associated with the partner,” writes Makaripe. Indeed, what at times pleases the eye can be damaging to the spirit.

Other engaging chapters in “Bleeding Hearts” are: “It Was Love at First Sight”, “When Love Becomes Blind” which argues against the myth that love is blind, “When Your Best Is Not Good Enough”, “In The Beginning God . . . ” and “Picking Up The Pieces”.

Tendai Makaripe, born in Goromonzi, is currently studying for a BSc Hons in Political Science at the University of Zimbabwe and “Bleeding Hearts” is his first book.