Center Justified -- The choice of professionals

[alohadave]

I got curious enough to do some five-minute research to see if the hate appears warranted, or at least whether I can tell without actually buying any of her books.

Wikipedia pages for her and It Ends With Us (her only book to have a WP page) don't go beyond simple factoids. There were no quotes from aghast critics decrying the quality of her prose, though there were some excerpts from such titans in the sophisticated literary circles as Romantic Times which praised her writing. All in all, not many clues.

So I did what any average person would do and asked Google "why coleen hoover sucks".

What I found was that the Reddit consensus (from r/books) seemed to be that she glorifies domestic abuse, whatever this means; her son was accused of sexual assault, as if that was some condemnation of her (veracity of passive-voice "accusation" in the post-#MeToo era notwithstanding); and finally, that she is showing signs of "misogyny and crypto-conservatism" (LOL).

So, in other words, it looks like her main crime was not going along with the uber-woke zeitgeist in YA literary circles. Hardly a compelling reason to condemn her, me thinks.

She might still absolutely stink as a writer, of course, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if she does. But this at least hints in the direction of a lot of the hate being unfounded.

From what I've read, she was in the right place at the right time. She had self published, got a reviewer to review her book and based off that and her social media presence, got a book deal. Then the pandemic happened and lots of people had free time to read.

A perfect storm for a mid-level author to hit it big.

Like with 50 Shades, it doesn't have to be great to sell a lot of copies, it just needs to be good enough at the right time to sell.

 

[Cagivagurl]

There is also an over all blandness and lazy plotting. Ugly Love is supposedly set in San Francisco yet not one landmark, not even the Golden Gate Bridge is mentioned! The novel could be set in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Shanghai or Cairo and read exactly the same. There isn't even a street name anywhere either real or fictional. Also the male protags are are younf pilots yet they DRIVE from San Francisco to San Diego for Thanksgiving. First, that is a brutal drive that would take all day even if you started at 3 AM. Since they work for an airline, just fly. Aren't free flights one of the perks that draws people to being pilots in the first place. Finally the pilots in the book are twenty-four and just out of flight school and yet they BOTH get Thanksgiving off, the busiest flying day os the year! Seriously? These guys simply don't have the senority to get T=day off yet. So Hoover does NO research, has no clue about geography or how employment works. Instead we get two horny twenty somethings who can't keep their hand off each other for ... reasons. Bothing about any of them is appealing or interesting.

You sure have a bee in your bonnet...
My reaction is...
So what who cares????
It's fiction... It can go anywhere, do anything.

If this book irks you this much. Maybe find a new book to hate...

Cagivagurl