By Riley Dauber
Lifestyle Editor
One cannot walk into a Barnes and Noble without finding tables or shelves full of books with one woman’s name on the cover: Colleen Hoover.
Hoover, who self-published her first book “Slammed” in 2012 so her mom could read it, grew in popularity thanks to the social media app TikTok. One community of TikTok known as BookTok provides viewers with book recommendations and reviews.
According to The Guardian, these videos help older books find new fans, and Hoover’s bibliography is no exception.
Her novels include “Ugly Love,” “November 9,” “It Ends With Us,” and “Verity.” The majority of her books are romances with a focus on characters’ emotional connections and traumatic pasts.
Thanks to BookTok and her digestible writing style, Hoover held six of the top 10 spots on the New York Times Bestsellers list in 2022, according to The Guardian.
However, popularity does not mean her books are well received. Many critics post videos to TikTok and Youtube discussing their dislike for her Hoover and her novels.
Content creators like Nicole Rafiee, who released two videos reading and discussing “Ugly Love” and “November 9,” and Caleb Joseph, whose video, “A complete history on my feud with Colleen Hoover,” has over one million views, criticize the content in Hoover’s books.
“If I was 15-years-old and I was in a toxic relationship…maybe there would be a part of me that would think that that is just how love is because everyone is talking about how romantic it is. Maybe I should just go along with this abusive relationship because…Hoover said it’s fine and everyone on the internet said it was super cute,” Joseph said.
The root of these criticisms is that these books are marketed toward young readers, but contain mature themes and sexual scenes that are more appropriate for an older audience.
Critics say these themes are dangerous to push on impressionable readers because, more likely than not, the female characters are present to help the male characters process and understand their traumatic pasts.
“The female characters have nothing to them because it’s always surrounding the men’s pain and everything and the women have to be like ‘oh, it’s okay,’” Rafiee said in her video on “Ugly Love.”
Readers also discuss the questionable female representation in Hoover’s romantic thriller “Verity.”
The novel follows Lowen Ashleigh, a writer who is asked to ghostwrite the three remaining books in Verity Crawford’s popular thriller series while Verity heals from a recent car crash. Lowen is invited to stay with Verity’s husband, Jeremy, and gets to know him and his son while learning more about his wife’s life through a draft of her autobiography.
Through Verity’s manuscript, Lowen learns that she did not want children, but Jeremy did. Verity is painted as a ‘bad’ woman for not wanting children and not wanting to be a mother, whereas Lowen is viewed as the ‘good’ woman because she accepts the fact that Jeremy will love their children more than her.
“He deserves to be with someone who will put her love for his children before anything else,” Lowen thinks after reading a chapter of Verity’s manuscript. The line, and the comparisons between Lowen and Verity throughout the novel, support the narrative that the best women are mothers, and women are only good when they are mothers.
When it comes to Hoover’s romance novels, the relationships are not portrayed any better. “Ugly Love” features a past relationship between step-siblings, and scenes in “November 9” lack verbal consent.
But despite the overabundance of criticism, Hoover’s novels are still popular. TikTok users frequently recommend her books, with some “[posting] themselves sobbing, screaming, gasping in astonishment, and pressing her books to their hearts in winsome displays of adoration,” according to Slate.
One cannot help but feel intrigued at these wild displays of emotions, and some pick up a Hoover title just to see what all the fuss is about.
Her books also fly by thanks to the simple writing style.
Similar to how viewers flock to their televisions to watch a new season of “The Bachelor” or tune in to their favorite trashy teen show, readers continue to pick up a Hoover title to get lost in the story.
Her books offer a bit of escape from the real world, and it is easy to follow the entertaining plots and see how Hoover will twist and turn the story.
According to Slate, “[Hoover’s] books are efficient delivery mechanisms for the maximum dosage of multiple crowd-pleasers: love stories, unabashed smut, trauma plots, tear-jerking soap opera, and wild narrative twists. They are the everything bagel of popular fiction.”
While Hoover continues to grow in popularity, more and more content creators release videos either praising or criticizing her work. So long as people read and talk about her books, they will introduce different perspectives and opinions about Hoover’s bibliography.
Photo courtesy of Riley Dauber
Photo Caption: Some tables at Barnes and Noble feature popular books currently trending on BookTok