okay i read ugly love around three years back too and why does it have a 4.0 rating on goodreads? who is reading this and going "yes, five stars"? be serious. tate, the female lead has no personality. like none. her entire existence revolves around miles. her defining trait is being named tate. that’s it. she does not think or act outside of what miles says or does. she’s basically a cardboard cutout with a heartbeat. and miles is a mess. he has unresolved trauma from six years ago, which, fair, trauma is real, but also, he uses that as an excuse to treat tate like garbage. and we’re supposed to feel bad for him? he’s "emotionally unavailable,"aka emotionally abusive, and somehow it’s romantic because he’s hot and damaged. GO TO THERAPY miles. it’s been six years. not once did this man think, hmm maybe i should talk to someone about this instead of using women like disposable tissues. the plot is also just deeply weird. i get it, it’s called ugly love, so we expect some mess. but this is not "ugly." it’s just badly written. the prose is what a 13 year old girl writes in her wattpad draft when she’s both bored and horny. like where is the editor? and let’s talk about miles’s tragic past. his stepsister rachel. there’s no explanation for how or why they fall in love. they just are suddenly obsessed and then pregnant. and then tragedy strikes, the baby dies. which, of course, is devastating. but the emotional depth of this whole subplot is zero. like you’re just told, this happened, they loved each other, it was sad, feel something, and you don’t, because there’s no reason to. and even rachel again has no personality outside of miles.
just like tate. just like lily. colleen hoover writes women like they’re accessories for male pain. now let’s return to tate, who gets treated like absolute shit the whole book. used, tossed around emotionally, manipulated. and then she marries him because he had trauma and that’s supposed to excuse everything? girl. and the cherry on top is tate, who broke off a relationship earlier because she wanted to focus on her career, ends up pregnant. where’s the career now?? and that’s another thing. colleen hoover’s books never treat pregnancy with any real world seriousness. women get pregnant left and right and there’s no conversation or autonomy. remember rachel’s pregnancy? miles just decides for her. he’s like, i’ll handle everything. i’ll raise the baby. like sir where is rachel’s opinion in any of this? why is abortion not even a passing thought? she’s 19. she has no say. everything is decided by miles. the women in her books are just plot devices and vessel for the men. so yeah, ugly love is really bad.
okay and can we talk about "we laughed at our sons balls?" WHAT. WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU LAUGHED AT YOUR INFANT SON’S BALLS. and the worst part is that right after saying that, they fall into a river. is this karma? because if it is, it makes sense. how did this make it through editing? how did someone read that line and go, yes, let’s publish this. colleen hoover is such a bad writer. why does she even exist as a published author? HOW? there’s so much catshit.

underwhelming response.

looking out the bus window realising i'm a really bad person sometimes, even though i genuinely love with all my heart, there's a really bad part that ruins everything.

insufferable bitches.

its funny how they think they know me

okay so i read november 9 by colleen hoover in like one and a half days. partially because college is going on, but also because i had to skim through parts of it. i could not bear to read every single word of this mess. and i need to say it, my hatred for colleen hoover's writing is intensifying with every book i touch. it’s not just bad. it’s actually dangerous, especially because her books are targeted at young women.
the male lead in this book is named ben. and from the moment he appears on the page, he’s creepy. like within ten minutes of meeting fallon, the female lead, his thoughts are on her boobs. not her personality, not the fact that she’s obviously in a fragile emotional state, but her boobs. and more specifically, he wonders if her burn scars are on them too like it’s some kink for him. sorry but WHAT?? fallon is a burn survivor. she was in a house fire when she was sixteen, on november 9, and it left her with scars all over her body. she stopped acting, lost all confidence, and struggles deeply with her self image. and ben’s response is to fetishize her trauma. this isn’t a one off moment either. it’s a recurring obsession of his. and the worst part is that the book treats this obsession like it's love when it’s objectification and manipulation in disguise. and let’s talk about fallon. colleen hoover cannot write female characters who are anything more than broken little dolls for damaged men to fix. fallon has zero sense of self, she’s deeply insecure (which is understandable) but hoover treats her insecurity like something that can be solved just because a guy says "you’re beautiful." therapy, self work? no, just a man’s validation and then poof! all her trauma is cured. sorry, but that’s not how healing works. and the idea that it does is so, so damaging. ben constantly disrespects her boundaries. he pushes her, he manipulates her, and every time he opens his mouth he says something that gets more unsettling the longer it goes on and yet somehow he is the romantic hero. this is the man we’re supposed to swoon over? and then there’s the whole structure of the book. they agree to meet once a year on november 9 for five years. no contact in between no phone calls no messages nothing. just five annual dates. we’re supposed to find this poetic or romantic or deep. but it’s stupid. how do you fall in love with someone you see once a year? and then stay obsessed with them for years? it’s unrealistic and weird. oh and THEN comes the plot twist and this part genuinely pissed me off. turns out ben was the one responsible for the fire that injured fallon. he was a teenager at the time and he caused the event that destroyed her career, body image, mental health, and life. and instead of telling her the truth, he writes a book about it and hides it for years. and the way she finds out is by reading his manuscript. how does fallon respond to this horrifying revelation? she walks away briefly and then apologizes to him. she apologizes TO HIM for walking away after learning that this man is the direct cause of her trauma. i’m sorry, but that is not love. that is manipulation. and of course, it wouldn’t be a colleen hoover book without a side of incestuous drama. ben has sex with his dead brother’s wife jordan. it’s written like some noble act. he’s apparently doing it for "the baby." that’s literally the justification. once again, hoover pulls trauma into the story and then uses it as a cover for terrible decisions. it's genuinely disturbing.

so i read verity by colleen hoover around the same time i was reading the other books, unfortunately. and well, i’ll say that it felt better than some of her other stuff, but that’s not saying much. or maybe it wasn’t better. maybe it just tricked me for a second. because looking back, this book is basically a cheap rip off of rebecca by daphne du maurier. like, not even subtly inspired. the premise, the structure, the woman entering another woman’s life through a man, all of it felt like someone read rebecca and tried to write a fan fiction with correct grammar. first of all, the characters, i loathe them all.
lowen, jeremy, verity, i hate every single one of them and i swear, why can’t a single character in colleen hoover’s books have a normal name? is there a generator somewhere for awkward white american names?
anyway, lowen is as bland as you’d expect. absolutely no spine, no personality, no moral compass, just in love with the guy. which is the only real defining trait colleen gives her female characters. and jeremy is just suspicious and weird, and honestly, i still don’t know what we were supposed to think about him. and verity is creepy and horrifying too sometimes. the horror element does work in certain scenes. like, i remember feeling a little creeped out in the sense that if i were in a huge house with a woman in a coma upstairs, i’d also be terrified. but those moments are brief because again, colleen hoover starts with interesting premises, this mysterious manuscript, the unreliable narration, the ethical tension, and then just never commits. she drops all the threads that could make a book really good. like she starts 10 different ideas and runs with the most predictable one. and let’s talk about that manuscript. like, again, just like in rebecca, the story gets shaped through the dead (or supposedly dead) woman’s perspective. except, this time, it’s gross. it’s just violent mommy trauma and sexual obsession, and at the end you’re left thinking, okay, but what was real? also, a pattern i’ve noticed, every female character in her books is either defined by her trauma or her ability to get pregnant (usually without consent, and it’s treated like a romantic twist). why does every hoover book feature surprise pregnancies, and why are none of them talked about in any serious way? the amount of bodily autonomy issues that get swept under the rug in her books is actually alarming. and one last thing, she really does not know how to write sex scenes. they are either painfully awkward or deeply unrealistic, and always described in the most bizarre ways. like, genuinely, who let this woman publish so many books with zero editorial pushback? so yeah verity was just another bad colleen hoover book. if you’ve read one, you’ve read them all.

i love north eastern people 😭🙏

what my mother doesn’t realise is that she and i are basically the same person. we have the same habits. even the ones that irritate her, i got those from her. she gets annoyed when i read too much, but that’s something i picked up from her. she’s the biggest book lover i know. actually, the only one i’ve seen who reads like that, apart from me. we both don’t like phone calls. we forget to call people. we even forget to call each other. and when we do talk on the phone, it barely lasts five minutes. it’s usually just, hi, how are you, what did you eat, what are you doing right now and then silence, then we hang up. some days we go without talking at all. and that’s the part that feels a little sad. because we don’t really share things with each other the way we probably should. maybe we just don’t know how to. or maybe we’re too similar in that way too.

i think most of us weren’t born hating our faces but we learned how to while growing up. and most of the time, it starts from home. like when your mother says, "put some haldi, it’ll brighten your skin." or when an aunt comments, "you were fairer as a child." or when someone fleetingly asks, "what happened to your face?" because of a breakout and all of a sudden, your body becomes a thing to fix and you didn't even know it was broken.
it’s strange how this obsession with beauty seeps into us before we even understand what beauty really is. there’s always some standard that skin should be clear teeth aligned hair silky body soft but not too soft. waist small but not too small nose straight scars invisible and if you fall short on any of these, someone always lets you know. but what if we didn’t fall short? what if the problem isn’t with our faces or our bodies, but with the very idea that they need to be corrected? why are we so scared of flaws? why do we flinch at our scars, even though they are proof that we’ve survived things? why does beauty have to be about perfection? maybe because it’s generational. our mothers were taught the same things, made to feel ashamed of the same things so now they pass it on, trying to protect us by making us more acceptable to a world that rejects anything outside the norm and we mistake that for care. we grow up believing that beauty is love but it isn’t. it’s just another cage. and i don’t want to live like that anymore. i don’t want to keep negotiating with my body like it owes the world something prettier. i don’t want to keep apologising for not being the kind of girl people expect to see. i want to sit with my flaws. i want to learn how to love the scar without trying to erase it. i want to be okay with being seen exactly as i am, not after i’ve "fixed"myself. we were never meant to look perfect, we were meant to live.

okay so i'm done with coho now. never touching a book written by her again in my life. i hope no one else does either.