Dubbed as the “Booktok Queen”, she is known for her spicy, daring romance novels with traumatic plot twists, as well as her first movie in 2024. This author has been quickly gaining fame and a cult following since the pandemic. Any guesses?
44-year-old Colleen Hoover has published 26 books, with her being the “No. 1 New York Times bestselling author” for 24 of them. If this doesn’t speak volumes of her popularity and high demand, her presence on “booktok”, a subcommunity on TikTok dedicated to good reads, will. All of this begs the question: do Colleen Hoover’s novels live up to the hype?
Hoover’s most famous book, “It Ends With Us”, was published in 2016, but only until the pandemic blew up on Booktok and prompted Hoover to write its sequel, “It Starts With Us”. This story follows Lily and Ryles’ seemingly perfect meet-cute and relationship, which quickly turns toxic and violent.
This book, and its movie, are marketed as a swooning romance, with little to no warning as to its abusive nature. Many of her other books contain toxic portrayals of love and abusive content. With the lack of awareness around these books, I believe that Hoover tends to use these themes for an enthralling plot twist, but nothing more.
She does not use her books as an opportunity to educate others on the realities of abusive relationships. In fact, she more commonly romanticizes these toxic relationships and realities for many women, which is extremely misleading, especially to her younger audiences.
This is especially harmful when young girls choose to read romance novels and instead are reading about normalized toxicity and violence within a relationship, marketed as a love story. Just as well, when these topics are introduced through characters, Hoover does not pay them enough care and mind.
If trauma is a main theme in a story, she would do well to substantially expand on it, however she simply uses it to further her story and make for “gripping” plot twists. All this accounted for, she knows how to make her books popular and interesting.
This controversy around traumatic events was especially present in the film adaptation of “It Ends With Us”. Many complaints arose from the film being marketed as a flowery, sweet romance when it was *extremely* well known that the book was based around abuse.
It was disliked that the lead actress, Blake Lively, her director husband, Ryan Reynolds, as well as Colleen Hoover were so silent about promoting abuse awareness through this film. Hoover went along with this version of “It Ends With Us” for marketing, which also resembles how she promoted the book. It is very distasteful to promote a book and movie centering around toxic relationships without addressing the abuse.
While some of her novels are diverse in terms of plot, most contain the same, tiring trope. Girl meets boy, boy seems to be perfect, turns out to be a liar or has problems etc. This particular plot loses its novelty after a while, especially when the girl continuously settles for toxicity in the form of love.
All of this considered, why is Colleen Hoover (still) so popular, especially considering how much controversy surrounds her and her writing style? Partly, her fame is due to the traction she gained during the pandemic from “It Ends With Us”, and now its movie premiere. And now I will give credit where credit is due; Hoovers’ writing style makes the books interesting and a fast read. While flawed at times, it is easy to see why the book might be in high demand, especially when praised on large, international platforms.
Her fame might be partially due to her striking topics that blew away the Booktok community. Sure, romance and thrillers and plot twists have always been around, but in a well written form? That is difficult to find. All of this is to say that her books are not highly praised for no reason – some are interesting reads and can keep a reader occupied, for sure.
However, I can’t help but to question if our quality of literature is rapidly decreasing. Good literature gets produced every single day, and sure, some of it gets the deserved fame, but why do we popularize controversial, mediocre books? Where are the “classics” of our generation? In 50 years from now will they be reading “It Ends With Us” in English class?
Hoover’s books and disputed topics are, quite frankly, becoming tiresome and do not deserve anymore spotlight. I especially say this because they deliver a host of misleading information and troublesome messages to young, impressionable readers. There is surely much more good literature that is equally interesting and well-written that deserves to be praised on such platforms that Hoover has been occupying.