The Massive Success of Colleen Hoover’s Books & The Good and Bad Values They Represent
Spoiler Alert: I discuss major plot points Colleen Hoover’s books It Ends With Us, All Your Perfects, & Ugly Love.
Over the past couple of years, books have gone viral on BookTok (the book side of TikTok). Probably the most popular author who has blown up on BookTok is Colleen Hoover, who writes contemporary romance and even has a couple of thriller novels (her thriller Verity horrified me!). As of July 2022, Colleen Hoover’s books fill the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 9th spots on the NYT Combined Print & E-Book Fiction. And if that’s not wild enough, all 4 of these books came out between 2014 and 2018, and yet they are on the bestseller list in 2022. Many Barnes & Noble book stores even have entire tables just for Colleen Hoover's books.
So, how in the world has Colleen Hoover’s books that have been out for several years completely dominated over the past year, and what Entertainment Values do her books represent?
The Good:
Let’s start with the great things about Colleen Hoover’s books. Colleen’s books often get critiqued for being poorly written or overly cliche. Personally, I don’t mind her sometimes cliche writing, but this certainly bothers some people. So, as popular and loved as her books are, they get a lot of hate.
My friend Austin Scholar writes about the idea that “you should read what you love until you love to read”. And the thing is, so many teenage girls LOVE Colleen Hoover’s books and credit a newfound love of reading to her. I can actually relate to this as well because Colleen’s books got me back into reading last year.
Teenage girls and others are reading more because of Colleen, and this should be celebrated. Even if her books are a little cliche or not the best writing ever, they are still books with actual substance. Colleen’s books are always incredibly emotional, contain deep romances, and often have jaw-dropping plot twists (IMO, November 9 and Verity have the best plot twists).
The book I most recommend from Colleen is also her most popular, It Ends With Us. This was the first book I read by Colleen, and all I knew about the book was that it was about a girl that falls in love with a neurosurgeon, and for the first half of the book, that’s what I thought it was.
In actuality, the book is about the complicated reality of domestic abuse. It Ends With Us follows a young girl watching her father abuse her mother and that same girl experiencing abuse in her own relationship later in life. Colleen was inspired by her mother’s experiences with her father, and she wrote the book in order to figure out what it’s like to be a woman in an abusive relationship and why women often choose to stay with their abusers.
“Shouldn't there be more distaste in our mouths for the abusers than for those who continue to love the abusers?”
Colleen Hoover, It Ends With Us
Another book I love by Colleen is called All Your Perfects, which alternates timelines between a couple meeting and falling in love and then that same couple’s marriage falling apart due to infertility struggles. Many of the people reading this book are teenagers, and very few teenagers have even thought about infertility, let alone experienced it. So, yes, it’s a romance novel, but it also represents one of the most difficult struggles women and marriages can experience. And, the book doesn’t end with them magically having a baby; instead, the couple finds a happy ending while still living with the heartbreak of their infertility.
“I promise to love you more as a childless woman than I would love you as a mother. And I promise . . . I swear . . . that if you choose to end things between us, I will love you more as you’re walking out the door than on the day you walked down the aisle.”
Colleen Hoover, All Your Perfects
The Bad:
Not all of Colleen’s books have such clearly positive messages, though. One of her most popular books, Ugly Love, is about a woman who starts a friends-with-benefits type relationship with a man. He treats her horribly throughout the book, and then at the end you find out he was secretly in love with her the whole time and was just too nervous to fall in love again after a traumatic event in his past. As much as I loved this book (I cried at the end), it’s a pretty terrible representation of love and relationships and may cause young women to endure terrible behavior from a boyfriend in hopes that things will end up perfect. On the positive side, though, the main character Tate does at least acknowledge that she is putting herself through a bad situation, so it isn’t like the book is completely clueless about the way she’s being treated:
“I’m terrified to lose him for good, so I sell myself short and take what I can from him, even though I know I deserve better.”
Colleen Hoover, Ugly Love
So, my point in saying that there is a potentially damaging message in Ugly Love isn’t to necessarily say you shouldn’t read the book, but rather you should be aware of the unrealistic expectations the book sets.
This is sort of a general issue that comes with most romance books: they set unrealistic expectations of love and possibly encourage women to endure emotionally damaging behavior from a man.
I believe that if you are reading Colleen’s books, or any romance book for that matter, it is essential to be aware of how you and your view on romance are being affected. It’s possible to simply enjoy the books as entertainment, but it’s also possible to get consumed in the unrealistic and toxic messages.
Overall, Colleen’s recent success is well-deserved, and even though there are some negative messages in her books, they are met with many positive messages as well. And, thanks to her, many teenage girls and women are falling in love with reading, and this is an amazing thing.
Written by Peyton Price - Entertainment Values