Pride and Prejudice, The Fault in Our Stars, Romeo and Juliet: all love stories that make us cry, laugh, love, and wish to be loved. We fall in love with the characters on the pages, await the tragic plot twist that makes us question their fate, and then turn to the final page and smile because their story continues, or cry at the harsh reality that romance may only be real in the pages of a book.
Colleen Hoover, a writer famous for her romantic characters and plot twists, has taken the media spotlight as many of her well-known books written years ago are flying off the shelves once again. One of her most famous novels, It Ends This Us, has sparked a worldwide buzz over the story of a girl from a broken home in love with both the man from her past and the man of her future. The book’s shocking plot twist has readers dumbfounded, questioning what they thought they knew, and discovering the true meaning of you can’t judge a book by its cover.
But why is the buzz around Hoover’s books so profound? And what draws us to her romantic storylines?
Especially after the last few years, many of us discovered how truly difficult and fragile this world is. We have all questioned who we are, our life choices, and those we spend our time with. To be frank, life sucks and reality is scary, sometimes so heavy that it makes us feel like we are drowning. So maybe that is why we are drawn to the romantic lives of the characters in a book, to escape the harsh reality of the world around us. If you are a Colleen Hoover fan, you would know that most of her characters find their happy ending. Even though they face trials and tribulations, they break them and rebuild them, and characters always make it out to the other side. Maybe we seek to fall under the spell of a good romance novel where the characters walk off into the sunset together in an effort to fool ourselves; we have faith, that maybe our reality might share the same fate. We feel hopeful, that one day too we will fall in love with the pilot across the hall, the man from our past, or the guy at the local diner that caught our eye on a faint November evening.
Many of Hoover’s books display different versions of love. They teach us the parts of love that we envy and the parts that make our hearts flutter. We keep coming back to these imaginative realities. More stories and plotlines, confessions of love and the grief of loss, new beginnings and joyous endings. We lose ourselves in the crisp ink of a book, to escape reality, even if only for a few chapters. That is the beauty of a good book.
Colleen Hoover, even though she is no Oscar Wile or Jane Austen, brings modern book lovers’ stories of passion, romance, sadness, and betrayal that have us smiling and crying at the same time. Her stories open up a world of romantic fantasy where we can take a break from the madness of reality and instead pour our hearts and dreams into the chapters of a fictional book. The captivating and all-consuming nature of her words allows us to take a breath and give us something hopeful to dream about at night. However, these are two outcomes that are hard to come by in the reality we face as we close the paper-back covers of a Hoover classic.