I don't agree with this rather snooty review--I think Hoover is the best of the rom com Western crop, and she IS the bestselling author world wide.
I've read EIGHT of her novels to date, and she's the best of the other rom com authors--whose work I have read between 1 and 3-4 novels each. I even bought 2 copies of It Ends with Us by accident and have read some of the rom coms twice. The ninth is in the mail right now.
A bit of a problem with the characters'names.
Hoover never repeats herself and the stories are all different.
Also she is somewhere between a literary novel and the current rather raunchy, explicit sex rom com and a horror story writer--though I can't read Stephen King.
Case in point, I remember the story lines and some of the characters are memorable--and she's always on the side of true love. She also makes her characters very vivid, like the totally deaf musician.
To the author of this review--if you can't suspend disbelief, you are stuck in reality--like 2 friends of mine who said they could not relate my characters to me. Of course they are not me.
I cannot be or have never been an aging lion in love with a pregnant princess (My--Beast) or a man about to be executed in the Karen/Kayin Uprising of 1948 -and so on.
It's the fault of the reader's lack of ability to imagine--to "fall into that world" as one of my 3 friends who are lesbians once said. That does not mean I am a lesbian myself.
Journalists and economists have this defect. Fiction is fiction and
fact is fact--but creative non-fiction is a combo--some (public figures, like Aung San Suu Kyi are real, as in my Wolf) and usually, the male lead and the female lead are creations.
As are the secondary couple.
This review is reviewing the movie adaptation which is not Colleen Hoover's original novel.
https://slate.com/culture/2025/10/regretting-you-movie-colleen-hoover-book-mckenna-grace.html?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
Beast is available online free on Himal Southasia website.
You can buy Black Rice and Wolf by K.M. Kaung on Amazon.
My fiction is all by K.Kaung or KM Kaung except for the 2 short stories in Himal.
I usually write my political commentary and economics articles as Kyi May Kaung.
Happy reading to you, not disgruntled pooh-poohing.
Kyi May Kaung
10-29-2025
Hazelnut tort from 2009--that I can't eat now. Kaung.
