Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us, (2016) went viral on TikTok and numerous other social media platforms for being an addicting and fascinating read that leaves you on the edge of your seat. But that isn’t the focus of our review: Was this novel a one-hit wonder? Or do Hoover’s other novels live up to the hype?
To identify if her other writing lives up to the standards set by this bestseller, The Post plans to write reviews on many other works of hoovers. The first novel we chose is Regretting You.
Regretting You focuses on two main characters, mother and daughter, Morgan and Clara. They want nothing more than to be complete opposites of each other. Morgan fears her daughter will make the same mistakes she once did and doesn’t want her to follow in her footsteps. Morgan and Clara are constantly bickering and clashing heads with one another; it seems that the one thing that brings them together is Chris, Clara’s father. He serves as the anchor of the family. So when he is involved in a tragic accident, the tension between Morgan and Clara reaches an all-time high. Secrets, lovers, misunderstandings, and lies begin to come out. While Clara finds comfort in a boy she is forbidden to see, Morgan connects with someone she never thought she would.
The novel rotates chapters between Clara’s point of view and Morgan’s point of view, allowing the reader to see different perspectives. While your first instinct might be that this chapter structure might show how different Morgan and Clara are, it draws out their similarities. You start to see parallels between the two characters and it has a cool effect on the reader: it causes you to think through both sides of the story thoroughly. The effect allows the readers to notice the similarities and differences in the characters, showing that both of them have very different views on life but neither of them are wrong for that. This style of writing also provides refreshing contrast between the mind of an adult woman and a teenage girl, while also highlighting that even though she is an adult, Morgan certainly does not have everything worked out.
Another reason that this novel is great is that the supporting characters play a very important role as well. We enjoyed how there were characters other than the main ones that had an important role in the novel and they can develop as it went on. An example of this is the relationship between Clara’s love interest Miller and his “gramps”. The relationship between the two of them is very special and it develops as the story goes on.
Conversely, a part of the novel we did not particularly like was how slow it was at times. Occasionally we would get bored with the speed it was moving at. We also didn’t love how the novel ended in a fairytale-type way. We would have appreciated a more realistic ending to the novel, even if it isn’t a happy one.
Overall we found this novel to be a nice quick read about life and death and the choices that come with it. We would recommend this book to anyone who enjoyed It Ends With Us and is interested in reading more of Hoover’s work. While we enjoyed the novel, we don’t believe that it lives up to It Ends With Us. However, we are going to continue to read Hoover’s work and see how her other novels compare.
