TW: Rape, Abuse

TW: Rape, Abuse

Photo Link: Echo Wang

Why I dislike Colleen Hoover : The decline of reading critically

Colleen Hoover is an American author who rose to fame after her books got popular on “Book Tok.” Book Tok is a “side” of tik tok that reads and reviews books. Her most popular novels are November 9, Ugly Love, Verity and It ends with us. Personally I’ve only read It ends with us, but from excerpts of her novels I don’t plan on reading them. 

Anna Todd is a popular fanfic author who wrote the infamous After series. So popular it got picked up for…. How many movies? Too many. (4) Anna and Colleen both have two things in common. Both terrible popular writers who romanticize and write hard topics beyond their writing skills. 

Even though my dislike for her is strong, there are a few things that I think she has accomplished. She became a popular known-romance author. Her novels are easily accessible because of the simplicity of them. I can admit that! I believe that readers of Colleen Hoover should develop better reading comprehension skills. 

I feel so strongly about my dislike of Colleen Hoover because I’ve read many, many romances. I’m a very picky romance reader. I can’t stand abusive, toxic, possessive men. Why would I want to surround myself around men like that? Now my preference strongly influences my dislike but not fully. Colleen Hoover doesn’t believe in Trigger warnings. Trigger warnings aren’t new, but to the modern political world people don’t need them! But here's the thing, Colleen Hoover doesn’t use them! Despite her constant use of rape, abuse, violence in almost all of her novels. Now this is debatable, why would this be bad? Because she believes it “Spoils” the story. Telling me that she uses these real life traumas solely on plot twists. If you look at most of her reviews from stans most will say they LOVED the plot twists. That is what Collen Hoover is, a “Romance” writer who writes rape as a plot twists. These characters do have “Happy Endings.” Spoiler for november 9 : She gets with the guy who burned her house down. Caused the burn damage on her skin and killed her mother in the fire. If that’s not a meet cute, I don’t know what is. 

Colleen Hoover also included a rape scene in her novel November 9. Later apologizing and having it removed from the novel. She later deleted her apology from facebook and never spoke about it again. Now this is relevant to Colleen Hoover’s character. When a girl online spoke about the sexual assault against her son, Colleen Hoover blocked the girl and continued to defend her son. Now of course not everything on the internet is true, but with the way she writes men makes me wonder how she views men. She also markets her novels as romance. 

Is simplistic writing bad? Of course not, simple language is what gets people reading. Most people wouldn’t read if they started with Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

I don’t hate Colleen Hoover fans, or the younger teenage girls for enjoying it. I just wish that the romance genre, although dominated by women, was less misogynistic and saw female characters as true, fleshed out characters. I believe that Colleen Hoover could improve the quality of her craft and her writing, by not calling her novels “Romance” and picking up a dictionary once in a while. 

I think the moral of this story is that not all popular writers are good, some just get lucky.