Ugly Love: a novel

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This story encompasses so many different things: love, loss, moving on, growing up, acceptance, forgiveness. It’s also a very slow reveal so it’s slowly building up in your head and heart until the final end where everything is revealed and reaches climax. It’s at this climax that Colleen Hoover had all my emotions in her hands and literally poured them all over me, all at once. The story is fairly short and the characters are fairly surface level, but the author did a great job of having me root for Owen/Auburn and disliking Trey/Lydia. ugh this pissed me off so much i couldn't even cheer for their romance because Miles was eh and honestly had no redeeming qualities in the present and then reading about his past pov being all in love with Rachel and in the present he just uses Tate for sex and pushes her away quite rudely all the damn time is, again, A-N-N-O-Y-I-N-G.

a sequel, which is an outright romance, being written to a book (marketed as a romance which is so gross) about domestic abuse really throws me off. In Maybe Someday, Hoover combined music and writing by releasing an album alongside the book with songs supposedly written by the characters. Now there was also a lot about the book that didn’t work for me, number 1 being I didn’t really like Auburn or Owen individually, and I never felt their romantic connection when they were a couple.I also loved that the author included real-life confessions, some that truly warmed my heart and others that made me tear up a little. He tells Fallon’s father that there are plenty of actors with physical injuries who have found success in Hollywood and that there is no reason to discourage Fallon.

But what really frustrated me was that he kept this big secret from her the entire book and it’s never resolved! However, there were 2 things that happened later on that made me go WTF and dragged down my rating considerably.

I mean come on, she may do a fantastic job of weaving her words in such a way that the relationship really does seem to build up naturally– it worked on me with Slammed, but I'm afraid this time round, she simply couldn't work her magic. The story predominantly alternates between the primary characters Elizabeth Tate Collins and Miles Mikel Archer. I’ve read It Ends with Us years ago and that book made me bawl my eyes out, because it was such an honest and realistic story about a women finally ending the circle of abuse in her family. Auburn was treated horribly by the same people she tried to appease,a tragedy was tattooed in her soul,yet she found the courage to love fiercely.

I wanted to feel for them by myself but instead I felt like I was being told how I should actually feel by their constant inner monologues. No one could accuse Colleen Hoover for not being creative with every single thing she's released thus far. Miles’s dad later reveals that he and Miles’s mom had planned to divorce long before he started seeing Lisa. It had a tinge of mystery that makes the people who are shamelessly curious pave through the pages at the Gods pace, to get where we finally understand what in the name of heavens is actually going on.

Or maybe I’ve become more jaded and cynical and can’t accept how she addresses sensitive issues and ties up loose ends in her stories? Although Miles is bothered by the idea of Tate being with someone else, he still won’t admit that he wants to be in a relationship with her.