November 9 by Colleen Hoover

Synopsis

You know, the thing about Colleen's writing is that it's not very mature. She addresses real and sensitive issues, yes, but not from the point of view of healed characters. Her characters are traumatised, and we are given reasons for their trauma, but that's where it ends. None of them have done or do any healing. None of them remotely attempt to resolve their psychological trauma. There's no character development. They're just bitter about what has happened to them and they let that define them. I wonder if Colleen realises that her characters are avoidant. It makes me further wonder if that's a trait she herself possesses since it's so recurrent. A trait that makes up the core of all her protagonists I've read about so far. 

The plot of this urgh book - There's a girl, Fallon. She's 18 and 30% of her body, including her face, were scarred in a fire while she was sleeping at her dad'd house. She blamed her dad because he's inherently an asshole and he didn't check up on her and just left her sleeping until she got burnt. Then we meet Benton, who is Ian's brother if you've read Ugly Love. Benton sees her at a restaurant and they meet on November 9th, day of the fire, and after they talk and he makes her feel good about herself and not insecure about her scars, they agree to meet once a year, on November 9th, and have no contact in-between. During one of their annual meetups, Ben is fucking his dead brother's idk who and Fallon is devastated. But they get together again afterwards and she finds out he was the cause of the fire that scarred her forever and made her lose her acting career, all because he was a teenager who thought his mother killed himself because of a man (the man in question was Fallon's dad, of course).

But then Ben explains everything in the manuscript of the book he was writing about him and Fallon and she forgives him and they live happily ever after.

***

I took an excruciating amount of time to get through this book. It was even worse than It Ends with Us. This is my third Hoover book and eh, it's a pattern. Everything is perfect in the beginning. We see something suspicious and some foreboding is sprinkled in. One of the characters has a horrifying secret that they've been keeping from this random person they met and instantly fell in love with in some weird,  trying-to-hard-for-an-OG-love-story way, and again all's well that ends well (except in It Ends with Us I suppose). Anyway. It's safe to say this book was only mildly good. I didn't start tolerating it until I was more than halfway through. And even then it was annoying.

About the plot, it was a nice idea, but the execution felt rushed. Also because there were mistakes in it. Silly ones. Like Ben referring to his brother Kyle as Ben instead of Kyle. Or having a snippet of Fallon's thought in Ben's perspective. It was a rushed book, we know it. Even the plot wasn't all that mind-boggling. 

And gosh, this is the ugliest book on my bookshelf. It doesn't even have anything to do with the plotline. The cover is yuck.

Overall, it was an uncomfortable read. The intimate scenes make me squirm and almost throw up. And when we find out that Ben was the cause of Fallon's burn scars, which is why he wasn't grossed out or too focused on them, that just made everything even more wrong.

I have very little more to say so I'll just sign off here.

Toodles.