BOOK REVIEW: Ugly Love

I am ruined.

I would like to think that after more than half a dozen books read and loved, I could call myself a seasoned Colleen Hoover reader and thus be equipped for all her ‘mind trickery’, and yet nothing, nothing in this world could have prepared me for the emotional avalanche that is Ugly Love. This is a book like no other in this author’s impressive repertoire, a book that gets under your skin from the very first sentence, and then page after page, it just keeps stripping you of every semblance of control you might have thought you had over your own feelings. It’s a book that annihilates you from within, slowly breaks your heart into so many pieces you’ll need tweezers to pick them all up, and then it simply stuns you into silence with one of the most unexpected, soul-shattering book moments in history. Every element of this story is so brilliantly thought out, so cleverly executed, so skilfully assembled into one of the most perfect stories I have ever read. Colleen Hoover is on an emotional rampage this time around, and she will ruin us all in the best possible way.

“Love isn’t always pretty… Sometimes you spend all your time hoping it’ll eventually be something different. Something better. Then, before you know it, you’re back to square one, and you lost your heart somewhere along the way.”

The story is split into two parallel timelines, one in the present and one in the past, and it follows two distinct voices all throughout the book. They are each so vivid and persuasive in their impact on the reader, that it often becomes difficult to reconcile them in our minds and see how one can coexist with the other. In the present, our heroine is a young woman in her early twenties, a student nurse who has just arrived in a new city to pursue a postgraduate degree and find a job. Tate Collins has never put relationships before her professional aspirations, her career always coming first, and she remains determined not to let love distract her from her goals. But on her very first day there, as she is moving into her new home, she meets her neighbour Miles, a young pilot and a close friend of her brother’s, and from that moment onwards, her heart doesn’t stop doing summersaults every time they run into each other. But Miles is not interested in love, now or ever again, and while their attraction is sizzling and at times difficult to rein in, he remains clear on two points…

“Don’t ask about my past. And never expect a future.”

In the past, we meet an eighteen-year-old Miles Archer, at the very moment he meets his first love. Through brief but particularly attention-grabbing little snippets of that past, we get to witness firsthand the heartwarming experience of falling in love for the first time through the eyes of a young Miles and it’s the very innocence of it all, the untainted joy and excitement of those feelings, that stand in stark contrast with the events and the Miles we get to meet six years later.

“It’s not that I don’t like you… I just don’t want to like you. I don’t want to like anyone. I don’t want to date anyone. I don’t want to love anyone.”

While in the past we see our hero free-falling into love, carelessly and enthusiastically, in the present scenario we see him holding back every one of his emotions from the woman who each day reluctantly falls herself deeper and deeper in love with him. As emotions start bleeding through, blurring the lines of the friends-with-benefits arrangement they have agreed on, Miles and Tate’s relationship becomes more and more complicated as time goes by, bringing them each day one step closer to Tate’s inevitable heartbreak and disappointment. Unspoken questions keep piling up, unrequited feelings keep getting suppressed, and eventually all that is left between them is the ugly side of love.

“Make me leave… You don’t need this… I just don’t know how to stop wanting you. Tell me to go, and I’ll go.”

I will stop here and tell you nothing more about this story. This is a book that will keep surprising you, devastating you, leaving you breathless by simply never allowing you to relax or foresee what lies ahead, and I assure you that you will never see the next blow coming. They are all delivered with such precision, I felt like I was on the receiving end of a knife throwing act. It’s a story that shows the resilience of the human spirit, regardless of how terrifying the ghosts of one’s past may be, and the healing power of love. The sheer brilliance of this book also lies in the language used, in the quirky dialogues, in the unique monologues, in the word repetitions, even in the extraordinary visual arrangements of words aimed to imprint the meaning of those words into our souls and leave us shivering in their wake. Nothing is accidental and everything is just right.

“I hope she remembers the moment
she
became
my
everything.”

By the end of this book, my hands were hurting from being balled into fists for so long, my heart was aching and rejoicing at the same time from the countless emotions it had been exposed to, my body was hurting from not having moved an inch for so many hours at a stretch, and I had developed an unhealthy animosity towards italics in general. This is the sexiest, most heart-wrenching Colleen Hoover book to date—a book that shows us a brand new side of this author’s writing genius, and it is in my humble opinion, her best work thus far.

I am so ruined… and I loved every single moment of it.

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