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Ugly Love Book Review
Ugly Love is a brothers best friend romance novel written by Colleen Hoover and first published 5th August 2014 boasting 333 pages, this beautiful, intense story makes it one of Colleens fan favorite books, gaining a lot of attention on booktok in 2021 and 2022.
Storyline/ plot
In this book we meet Tate Collins, an overworked and underpaid nursing student living with her brother Corbin, whose best friend and Pilot co worker Miles Archer lives across the hall from them. Upon arrival Tate finds an intoxicated Miles up against the door of her brother’s apartment which she cannot enter without disturbing him.
At first Tate and Miles feel anything but love towards each other, but they do share one thing: lust.
Miles experienced something horrific in his past making him reluctant to ever fall in love again and Tate, being a nursing student trying to make ends meet is far too busy to make time for a relationship so they come to the arrangement of a physical relationship only. Everything will run smoothly as long as Tate keeps to the one rule Miles set out: Do not ask about his past, have no expectations of a future.
Throughout the book we get a dual POV between both Tate and Miles, during Miles’ POV we get to uncover more of his traumatic past which allows us to understand why he is so against falling in love again within his lifetime. As the book progresses we see the dynamic between Tate and Miles transform into a connection deeper than just sleeping together, but, will Miles ever be able to put his past behind him?
Writing Style
Like always Colleen used her incredible ability to create a sense of realism with this story to represent to the reader how sometimes as bad as the past may be, we cannot let it affect us forever in fear of the same mistakes being made. Colleen makes the reader feel everything the characters feel due to her incredibly, emotionally descriptive writing which will fully immerse the reader into the world in which the story takes place.
With the dual POV we are able to understand the characters’ relationships on a much deeper level than we would if we only saw the thoughts and feelings of one person. The way Colleen uses flashbacks in her novels helps to add yet another layer of emotion the the book as not only do we see what happened to the characters in the past we start to understand more about their actions and attitude in the present tense.
Pros/ Cons
The pros of this story is how much character progression we see from Miles as well as the representation of facing fears you may have concerning relationships in the future due to something that occurred in a past relationship. I personally really enjoyed this book and really liked how even though it was more of a fast paced book everything flowed well throughout the story, however, my only con would be that the last chapter or so did feel a little rushed compared to the rest of the book but, still a satisfying ending.
Conclusion
Personally I rated this book four stars. I found it a really good quick read and managed to finish it one day, the story was at a good pace which kept my attention well with a really good balance of spice within it. I enjoyed the characters separately as well as together and thought the flashbacks were written really well to keep up with the rest of the plotline. Overall I thought the book was really good, I have since recommended it to a lot of friends who I feel will enjoy the brothers best friend trope mixed with a heartbreaking backstory.