Colleen’s obsession with service workers who turn out to be the owners really pisses me off. That woman couldn’t even fathom writing a working class love interest, everyone has to be secretly rich with no class consciousness
I wonder if she took it from Dhar Mann or if he copied her...or maybe they're copying each other because most of HIS videos follow same path "this person you thought was beneath you was actually above you!" so the lesson about the respect is not "respect people because it's the right thing to do" but "respect people because you never know how useful they can be to you"
“You uncultured swine! What are you lookin’ at, ya hockey puck?” (I sincerely hope everyone’s childhood memories are clear enough to recognize this reference.)
If the Grandparents have full legal rights to DM, shame on them for not giving that kid a proper name. Every time I hear DM, I think of Direct Message.
@@raemackinnonThat makes no sense because Kenna said that they were fighting for custody before Diem was born. Nobody knew she was pregnant until she was arrested so there's no way that Scotty would've picked the name.
When my sister was a teen, she was deep in a VC Andrews reading phase and wanted to have a daughter she planned to name "Heaven Leigh Dawn Lastname". Luckily, she had two boys
The part where Colleen was describing and justifying how Kenna wanted to kidnap her daughter for a week of fun literally made me gasp. My biological mother tried to do the same thing to me, i’m so traumatized I can’t even ride in a taxi and it happened when I was 6 (she threw me in a taxi and tried to take me back to her house, taxi driver called the police because I was screaming). i’m literally flabbergasted, I cannot believe she wrote that lmao
CoHo really needs to google stuff before writing. Because from what I know this is actually a pretty common situation kids experience with deadbeat parents or divorcees.
Im a little tired of people pretending like CoHo isnt an awful person or that she isnt actually into every aspect of her books. She IS the type of person to kidnap a child. Who knows, maybe something like this happened and thats why her son is a total creep?.
For someone who loves writing about trauma, Coho doesn’t understand it very well. I especially dislike how her main characters can get away with things that would be unforgivably awful if a side character did them.
The termination of parental rights is not something a judge gets to decide in a criminal case, its a civil matter. Kenna's rights were not terminated because she went to prison, they were terminated because at no point in the 5 years she was in prison did she reach out to her daughter, at all. Diem's grandparents petitioned for the termination of parental rights on grounds of abandonment. If our heroine had made good faith efforts to reach out to her child she could have a case against the grandparents because she would still have parental rights and they were deliberately keeping the child away given that all communications involving prisoners is monitored she'd have a paper trail. But Kenna's an idiot and CoHo refuses to use Google to look up the laws regarding this. Also, the state (doesn't matter which) will do back flips while sacrificing a goat to summon Satan to justify keeping a child with their mother, Kenna being the worst is why she doesn't have rights to her daughter and honestly it should stay that way.
I was looking for a comment like this because as soon as I heard that part it made me incredibly annoyed. I don't know a lot about how child custody is worked out but I could tell CoHo was just bullshitting that whole segment. It made no god damn sense. I don't understand how people find it so difficult to use google and would much rather just make shit up.
Okay, so, her bf and her get in a car crash. He's unresponsive. So she checks his pulse ON HIS MANGLED ARM, unsurprisingly doesnt find it, and then just leaves him in the middle of nowhere? And we're expected to think she deserves to be a parent???? She's too irresponsible to be a parent when she cant even check on an adult she supposedly cares about.
Wait wasn't she drunk *and* high back when they crashed? Ofc she wouldn't know better than try ln whatever arm was available Not excusing her for anything ofc, even more reason not to drive like that
I mean, it makes sense that she would have done that. She was drunk and high, and also presumably sustained injuries from the crash. I just think it’s weird that the conflict seems to stem from having left him behind instead of having caused the wreck???
@xorvictia their comment said something else when I commented, and they immediately changed it to mine when I commented. their original comment was also copying the person above theirs, so no i did not
Repetition is great... WHEN USED SPARINGLY, COLLEEN. Throwing it around at any opportunity makes the writing sound like my short stories for English class in year 7.
One of my professors told me that repetition doesn't equal redundancy. Of course, the context was reading a book in the course before I even attended college, so it doesn't apply here.
I love how coho characters go through insane trauma but stay in their live love laugh mindsets. They act like the most stressful thing they've ever experienced was being responsible for a bottle of water.
That’s actually not super unrealistic. It’s a fairly common coping mechanism, and one that I use often. If you pretend everything is fine and lovely, maybe you’ll feel like it is. Fake it ‘till you make it
Yeah but at some point you'll need to grieve and CoHo makes painfully plain characters not capable of having hobbies let alone feel such complex feelings@@JuliaMarieH
@@JuliaMarieHstop defending one of the most terrible writers active at the moment. You know for a fact that Coho did not write her characters that way on purpose
@@maddieb.4282i think they were just trying to correct the idea that its unrealistic. also a lotta people have theorized that she bases a lotta her works on her own trauma that shes basically never coped with well, and thus has basically gaslit herself into thinking it was actually all fine and romantic. It Ends With Us even suggests in the very start dedications page that her dad had been abusive, esp to her mom, and yet she still tries to ‘dedicate’ the book to him as if he were simply flawed and not actually a total piece of shit
so wait our main character drunk alcochol, knowing she arrived in the car/took car to a place she knew she'd be having a drink in, and then drove too fast, caused a car accident and then fled the scene leaving her fiance to die on the side of the road...she gave birth to a child and just never even TRIED to contact her(I know the grandparents didn't want to bring Diem for visists but like...she could've tried calling or writing letters. she didn't). and then she got out and the first things she did was to destroy her victim's memorial and then go to a bar to buy a glass of wine for what basically was an ego trip. and she did the latter(spending money) before she even got a job, when every penny counted....she then knowingly hooked up with her dead fiance's BF. and we're supposed to feel bad for her? we're supposed to root for her?
It's mind blowing. Kenna is an enormous selfish entitled pos and Ledger is awful. If I was the grandparents, I'd move and not tell anyone where we were going. Or get a restraining order against both of them. If Ledger wants to disrupt the peace in my home and re-traumatize the family over his boner for my son's murderer, he can have her and gtfo. Kenna should go back to jail and do another 5 years too. The first 5 didn't teach her anything.
So… I was listening to this video as a podcast while working (not looking at the video…) and I just found out through this comment that her daughters name is diem, not dm(like direct message or dungeon master from d&d) 😭😭😭😭 Coho why the weird names😭😭😭😭
It’s honestly so wild that Colleen, the Supreme Boy Mum, wants us to hate Scotty’s parents for being upset that their son died. Like she literally used Miles’ son dying as the justification for why he treated Tate like utter shit, but they’re unreasonable for grieving their son But hey I guess grief is only a good reason for being rude if they’re hot.
Which book/story are those two from again? With the god-awful names, similar characters and same shitty plot, all of these characters are starting to coalesce together into a massive blob and I can barely keep track of it.
@@Saphia_ Miles & Tate are from Ugly Love. Better known as the book where the stepsibling couple says & I quote: We both laugh at our son's big balls right before the car crash. Tate's not the stepsister girlfriend though, she's Miles' regular hook-up turned wife
Kenna contemplating kidnapping her daughter and planning this super fun day for her and thinking her daughter would love it unironically made me think of Natalia Taylor talking about when her father kidnapped her when she was a child and took her to an amusement park and how scared and confused she was. Obviously her circumstances are different, but the fact that the narrative in the book doesn't have Kenna think, "nah, I'm being crazy, of course I could never do that, that'd be awful," is so fucking bizarre to me. She doesn't think about what's best for the daughter she supposedly cares so much about, it's all "me me me." I genuinely don't understand how Colleen wrote Kenna the way she did and thought that she sounded at all sympathetic.
There's even a line where she acknowledges that she only wants to visit her daughter for herself to feel better, not because she actually cares for her daughter and yet we're still suppose to want her and her daughter to reunite when the thing she needs to reunite with is therapy
@@Lemoncakelover678 If only this was a different book with a different writer. I would actually love to read a book written from the perspective of a narcissistic deadbeat parent who always believes they're the victim.
@@suitdoggy4707 Sadly, we put more thought and care into Colleen’s plot and characters than she does. Of all the books I’ve read of hers and the detailed reviews on the books I haven’t/won’t read, I think her biggest flaw is that she is a LAZY writer. You can see it with how quickly she pumps out these books with these complicated themes, subjects and plots and she seems more concerned with titillating the reader than actually taking the time to do research on shit like PTSD, SA, neglectful/narcissistic parents, abuse, what prison is like for a young person let alone a young mother, the death of a child. All of these are from her books and all of them are rightfully criticized for being clumsy. I think she could write something pretty decent if she would just…ask herself why she wants to discuss these subjects in these books and treat those subjects with the care they deserve. She can’t do that if she publishes a book every 6 months. It’s so frustrating.
i’m so confused about how he didn’t recognize her. you’ve never seen a mugshot of the woman who killed your best friend? he even says something about her not looking remorseful in court? how does he know that if this story is the first time he’s ever seen her?
Every CoHo book has two stories: the one we read, and the terrifying one from a side character's POV. Imagine if this story were from the grandparents' POV. A+ thriller right there
...imagine if Kenna wasn't at fault for Scotty's death and just like a witness or something. Like if Scotty was mauled by a bear and she ran away. All of this story could make sense. Yes, the parents could still be mad, but reasonably, the only thing you're doing against a bear is getting eaten or mauled. Things could have been so much less icky.
Or if scottie told her to leave or she had a head injury or even if she was so deep in shock she wasnt even aware of anything happening around her would of been better
even if she had just had the accident going above the speed limit and him being actually dead right away. Then it's a mistake that is more excusable. Drunk driving, for most of us, is much more of a hard line than going a few mph to fast.
I imagined them getting in the wreck and then a bear manifesting from the woods and mauling him right after and then I realized that's not what you meant lmao
@@lilysiandaza4296 lol, I actually work at a bookstore and I'm responsible for the booktok and classics (kinda ironic i know) sections. I help with recommendations and book descriptions for my section and these videos give me an idea of what I'm working with without having to read all the books.
Once again, CoHo has written a book about a horrible person, doing horrible things and pretending that they're actually a misunderstood soul and the giant red flags and toxic traits being romanticized aren't that bad. She can miss me with this bullshit. 😮💨
As a society we tend to associate virtues to pretty/hot people........the way Ledger insists that the fmc is kind and selfless when she has literally not done anything to show that......obviously coho lacks the depth to make such social commentary.....but i feel that would be an amazing angle to explore
If I thought for one second that CoHo was writing these shitty people on purpose & that we weren't supposed to like them, I'd maybe think she was doing something interesting (like purposefully writing in the woman-centric romance category books full of terrible people to reflect the terrible people filled books of beloved (by men) authors like John Updike--so satire) but it's clear she is not.
Imagine grieving over your son and protecting your granddaughter who’s mom is trying to force herself into your home to grab her child who she never bothered to contact for 5 years😭 especially after killing your son for driving irresponsibly
And abandoning him! She not only drunk drive she then poorly checked his pulse before just up and leaving. I think the grandparents are still being too nice.
This whole novel is the epitome of the sentiment "if you can't forgive and forget, then you're WORSE than you're abuser!" Except dialed up to eleven with "and make it into a heroic story about how your abuser was right the WHOLE TIME and didn't deserve any of this!"
ikr? Ohh bohoo innocent baby kenna for having to deal with the consequences of her own actions tough luck shouldn't have killed someone then Same with NC parents, maybe should have been better to your kids if you wanted a relationship with them...
CoHo going on record saying she didn’t like romance until after publishing and being a true crime fan first retroactively makes her work feel like she’s throwing wild plots in her books to entertain herself through a genre she finds boring to read. Ironically, what she keeps doing is remaking soap operas; a popular type of romance fiction EDIT, since my replies aren’t coming up: To answer people replying with “why write romance, then?” CoHo became a romance author by accident. She always wrote stories as a child, and wrote a romance for her family to read on Kindle. She published it on Amazon and it became a bestseller. Most likely, romance writing was a grift for her until she dropped her prejudices and found romance stories she enjoyed.
I just wonder why she’s not writing crime and mystery novels then. You would think she’d be quite alright at that if you take her “romance” plots into consideration, but on the other hand Verity WASNT good so maybe she just isn’t a good story teller no matter how you twist it.
it’s bc she’s not like the other girl but she actually enjoy romance. but i’m sure she thinks other ppl romance are too snowflake but hers are different like beautiful messy chaotic not like the other books romance. she’s just a pick me
Everyone responds to trauma differently but I find it weird that Kenna's trauma is centered on alcohol and not driving. I was in a bad highway accident when I was 14 (I was a passenger) and that made learning to drive on the highway very hard. To this day, I get anxious sometimes on a busy highway (as a passenger or a driver). Like Kenna doesn't want to get drunk again, I get that, but I feel like it'd be realistic for her to also never want to get behind a wheel again either.
I also found that strange! I used to have panic attacks if it started snowing while I was in a car, passenger or driver, because I had a bad accident due to snow as a teenager. It is a little weird that she fixated on the alcohol, not the driving/being in a car.
@@ashannaredwolf8485yeah! Honestly, I wouldn’t fixate too much on this if a character responded to a traumatic event in such a way in an overall well-written story by the author I trust, since yes, people do have completely different responses to traumatic events, but in a Colleen Hoover book?.. yeah, I’m not gonna give the author a benefit of the doubt, it’s just off.
Hope you're alright! There is a sharp turn in the town next to mine where my mum, a friend & I ended up in a ditch cuz of an ice patch on the road (my mum was going WAY under the limit). We were fine, just shaken. For the following 8 to 10 years, I felt a knot in my stomach everytime we passed it I'm over it by now, but I was still cautious frequenting it (it's now closed due to multiple road constructions)
@@Nathi98 I'm glad you guys were ok! Me and everyone in the car were ok. We were very lucky and it was a long time ago, I'm 31 now. It's crazy how one event can alter your brain chemistry for years.
Alizee and Rachel Oates need to collab. They're both your unmarried aunts, but one will ask you how school has been going (they know actually what you're studying because they love you) and the other will slide you 20$ and teach you new swearwords (they love you just as much)
i honestly wish there was an insane plot twist where ledger caused the accident all along out of raging jealousy, like he cut the breaks or something after stalking them to the lake and then when scotty died he stepped in to replace him in his family and then when kenna got back he replaced scotty for her too
Ledger spiked Scotty and Kenna's drinks that night for a prank. He didn't realise they'd be driving afterwards. He wants everyone to treat the incident as a forgivable accident, because then he'd be getting their forgiveness without ever having to confess what he did.
@meriel5765 nah, ita CoHo[e] (wow 12 year old boy humour yass) we're talking about. Kenna reads the letter and feels sorry for Ledger. Why? Idk ask CoHo.
If someone was actually in a serious car crash that ended with a death, it would be surprising for them to put their feet on the dash after. Like have you never heard or seen what happens if you're in a crash with your legs up there. Even a minor little bump can be life changing by having your feet up there. Like a lot of people have the thought " It will never happen to me" but the person already knows that it isn't true. And you think the dude would be sensitive aswell due to losing his best friend. Like car safety would be always in the front of his mind. Like most people I know who are very strict with car safety, they often have a trauma filled reason for it but even if they didn't, it's best to be strict with car safety e.g belts always on, no feet on the dashboard. I wouldn't allow someone to put their feet on the dashboard while I drove and I've only been in minor accidents.
New ending: right after everyone forgives each other and happiness descends, Kenna suddenly remembers the accident more completely and it turns out Ledger was there, he drove because they were drunk and he wasn't, but he wanted Kenna for himself so he crashed the car on purpose, made it so Scotty would get the worst of it, put unconscious Kenna into the driver's seat so she'd think she did it, made sure Scotty was injured enough to die, and left. Then waited out her prison sentence while staying close to Diem knowing that she would come back for her and her could have her. THAT would have been a story.
I was 11 I heard about a drunk driver who drove up on the sidewalk and killed a 3-year old girl. I didn't know anyone involved, but it was fairly close to where I was living. The driver got 7 years in prison. And for the first time in my life I felt true rage over injustice. Every time the subject of drunk driving comes up I remember that little girl. Kenna is not a victim. And CoHo is a hack.
Ok but let’s talk about saintly Scotty making the decision to get drunk w his gf by a lake and then deciding not only to put his slightly less intoxicated gf behind the wheel but to get in the car with her. Like both of these ‘beloved protagonists’ are criminals the only difference is one of them is dead. Only tolerable character is the unnecessary and very minimally present girl who annoys Kenna while she’s crying
Thank you for trudging through another Hoover book so that we don't have to. WHY does she insist on giving her characters ludicrous names? I mean, Diem, seriously?!
Long time lurker here, I just wanted to say: Never stop talking! Your observations on these crappy books are not only as searing as a flame thrower but incredibly insightful. It's easy to state a book is sh***y and problematic and a waste of space but not everyone is able to bring across what the problematic thing is and why it is problematic in the first place. Kudos for that. Also, as being from a non-English speaking country, I like your accent. 😁 And now I'm off to dutifully subscribe...
this book feels like it needed a few things to change to... at least make the protagonist less annoying to read about. 1. Kenna needed to be an alcoholic. Scotty's death should be the reason she is now going full teetotaler after having been a party girl who used to think she was invincible. 2. She needed to have written letters, sent phone calls, literally done *anything* to make the reader believe she wants to see her daughter. Five years in prison with nothing? I don't believe she ever wanted to see Diem at all. Make the prison *never send her letters out*. Throw them right in the bin. Make that a plot point and a twist, so they're like "but you never even wrote" and they call her a liar for being like "yes i did i wrote all the time". 3. Just... god the opening scene is unbearable, first impressions are everything and Colleen wastes this one on making Kenna an absolute terror to Scotty's family. Horrendous. Leave flowers or something. Show remorse. Idfk.
If Ledger went to the trial… how did he not recognize Kenna? Also, wouldn’t her mugshot have been blasted everywhere after such an accident? How does he have no idea who she is at first? Make it make sense.
Well he's such a feminist, and he doesnt think we should reduce wahmen to just their looks, so he didnt really pay that much attention in court, because once he notices a wahmen is pretty he stops noticing she's pretty if you know what im saying? (Please read in that lilting voice miss yeezy does 😂)
alizee, i just want you to know that i felt my stomach almost drop out of my ass when i saw the name collen hoover, i thought i had finally been free from hearing about her.
I thought that the twist would be that Scott was driving, drunk, and they were arguing because she wanted an abortion which is also why she'd been drinking. Then when the police arrested her she took the blame out of some CoHo-logic guilt for not immediately wanting the baby and to make the dead man not look bad for the kid, and his family, since almost killing his girlfriend and their fetus would "tarnish his memory". But the twist was that she didn't do any of it on purpose...?
This is the only CoHo book I read (but I know about her other books “twists”. And I couldn’t believe the twist of this book of she didn’t mean to kill him and it was an accident. I thought it was obvious she didn’t do it on purpose a better twist would have been your idea
@@pam9919 I agree it was so obvious. Even her jail sentence; I mean if people thought she did it on purpose she'd been charged with second degree murder. Such an utterly pointless twist to add.
My best friend was murdered by a drunk driver. The idea that Coleen Hoover could try to excuse it and make something romantic out of it… I don’t want to wish ill on anyone, but if she’d ever experienced something that gut-wrenchingly horrible, she’d realize how horrible of a human being she is.
Thank you for the take on drunk drivers 🙌 I work for the dmv and have major issues with drunk drivers getting their licenses back period, let alone when they cause deaths. My mom's best friend was killed by a drunk driver. One of my friends was killed by a drunk driver. Both drivers are free&clear now. It's disgusting
Why is Colleen Hoover obsessed with writing love interests that are horrible pieces of shit. Why would I ever want these characters to fall in love or have good things happen to them?
as a person who works with kids (i’m a pk teacher), i can guarantee you diem would not trust kenna so easily. kids are actually very suspicious!!!! with everyone. it took like three weeks for the kids to even notice my presence at all lol
Kenna crashing and leaving Scotty for dead while drunk driving, then later having sex with his best friend and laughing about how Scotty is "mad" that Ledger's better in bed than he was, all while contemplating kidnapping her basically unknown daughter is some genuinely evil shit jfc Colleen
no way someone on the highway wouldn’t have stopped for him. bro, what? people report accidents when they see them happen. i have no idea what world colleen hoover lives in, but no way a car accident victim would go 6 hours without help.
I can actually prove your arguement right with another recent event (long comment sorry): A car to bike crash happened where I live. My mum & I heard it. We both got up to look & immediately the injured party was surrounded by 6 people. 100 & 112 were called before I was even across the road, which only took me less than 3 minutes. My mum too would have aided but she has Covid so she did not want to take the risk I myself went down & asked politely the fysiotherapist practice to loan us some cones. I remember from the previous one that they had some in their keep. I went to place them around the biker. I also placed the bike in a bike park spot across the T-intersection & handed the bikekeys back Other people gave her coats & blankets because it was freezing until the ambulance arrived. We were planning to ask to give one also but the ambulance arrived before I could ask As far as I know, the biker had some hip trouble but nothing too bad. Biker did not hit their head on the ground so that's good too THERE IS NO WAY SCOTTY WOULD BE LEFT DESOLATE AFTER A CAR CRASH FOR 6 HOURS MISSING AN ARM
I’ve actually read a first person account of a woman who crashed in a ditch and because trees and bushes covered the evidence of her being there, her husband and law enforcement didn’t find her for multiple days although they knew she was missing and were actively looking for her. Very scary and rare situation but that’s the only scenario I can think of where a car accident would go unresponded to
Somehow the mc not wanting to be given a cat by her landlord permanently solidified my dislike of another Colleen mc. Like yea she was already a shitty person for killing her boyfriend in a drunk driving incident, but now this idiot also outright dislikes cats? Trash mc. Colleen’s talent at destroying the mc’s relationship with the reader within the first chapter is mind boggling.
I mean, her situation wasn't really ideal for owning and rasing a kitten. Just out of prison, "new" to the city, nojob, a tiny place to live in. That's not necessarily the best circumstances to get a kitten, especially the no job part, because vet visits etc can get really expensive. But that's the only thing I could consider OK about all of the book.
@@TarisLunayeah, I feel it's justified. I never had any pets growing up bc we were really poor. I have money saved up now and I don't think I'll loose my job but I'm still too worried if I have enough living space and enough money to properly care for a pet.
I'm personally more concerned why the landlord would opt to give a woman fresh out of prison for irresponsibly drunk driving and killing her boyfriend a precious little kitten. This woman has shown zero ability to be responsible for another life, the kitten doesn't deserve to be a guinea pig.
My dad’s best friend in uni killed his brother while drunk driving. He crashed the car and he lived while his brother in the passenger seat died. I can’t fathom how difficult that must have been for the family. Knowing of this tragedy has kept me from driving under the influence my whole life.
Kenna never having a real moment of self self-loathing or self-reflection is almost impressive. Just once I want a co-ho protagonist to have an actual real conversation with someone.
I'm wondering if Colleen Hoover writes these books out of sheer boredom and thinks it's all crap but the money is good or if she genuinely thinks she's writing romantic stories with good characters
ok but the whole thing about “Grace and Patrick should forgive Kenna for killing their son because she’s sorry, and they’re being really mean to her” is like…I’ve lost a family member in a drunk driving accident before, and you don’t have to forgive the drunk driver, regardless of whether they’re alive or dead. Nobody gets to tell you “well you should just forgive them, they said they’re sorry,” because they KILLED SOMEONE that you care about deeply. Even just losing someone to natural causes, an illness or an accident that doesn’t involve another person fucks you up really badly, but when it was entirely preventable and happened because of the choices of someone else? And if that person is ALIVE, and has not apologized for the accident or tried to reach out to you AT ALL? Not to mention how this is going to affect Diem as she gets older. Having to tell a kid “yeah your dad died in a drunk driving accident before you were born” is already very difficult but when the drunk driver is the kid’s mom? That’s gonna be one hell of a conversation to unpack when Diem is in therapy as an adult. Colleen Hoover characters go to therapy challenge
My best friend's fiance was killed by a drunk driver who fled the scene and left him in the snow. The whole premise of this book makes me furious on that alone.
@@emmyrose233 it's been a few years now, so thankfully they've had the time to heal. Still, I think about that night sometimes and how devastating it was... makes me want to tear this book to shreds.
the main character stealing her ex's mom's cross out of the ground is like in curb your enthusiasm when larry kept stealing flowers from the memorial site
What boggles my mind is that Kenna is on parole and it's not mentioned anywhere. The restraining order would've sent her to prison... 🤔 It's almost like Coho doesn't do any research for her works, and it's even more hilarious knowing that she was a social worker so this stuff should be like bread and butter to her
As an American, I feel obligated to assure you that we, too, have a metric crapload of pigeons. Seeing one in your yard would not be like spotting a unicorn.
This one is kind of frustrating. Because a mother who accidentally killed her fiance and is looking for redemption is a pretty good premise. But I don't think it ever could have worked as a romance book.
I know it's just a small detail of the book but I truly hate the way CoHo is trying so hard to portray a character as not racist by literally spelling it out in the least subtle way which not only feels weird and unnecessary but also makes me question if CoHo thinks having poc friends/employees just automatically makes someone not racist 💀
Sizeable comment incoming (I wasn't going to be able to rest without performing a thorough analysis here): The problem I've realised I have with CoHo, after watching all of Alizee's and Rachel Oates' videos on her books, is that she doesn't write like...well, a writer. Books generally have a constant cause-and-effect system going on, which takes into account character motivations (ideally ones that remain consistent), and pushes every character to where they need to be, in a way that feels natural. Every detail in a CoHo book, however, appears to just be used as an excuse for plot points to happen. We "needed" Kenna's past to be that she killed her partner in a drunk-driving incident, because she needs to be in a situation where people hate her for an action she committed. Which is fine as a *premise* for a book; but the problem is, Kenna is not a character whose traits and motivations led her to drive while drunk. Kenna is a character that happened to do so, so the plot can happen. She isn't an alcoholic. She doesn't have a tendency to be impulsive or reckless (well, one might argue she does, but it doesn't seem that Colleen intended to frame it that way). Kenna and Scotty were just irresponsible that one time, to allow for something dramatic to happen. Colleen has prioritised drama over using character to explore a theme, or build natural cause-and-effect. And this is a pattern - Patrick and Grace, for example; you would expect the parents of someone who died tragically and senselessly to maybe be used (in a book) to maybe explore the idea of grief, or coming to terms with how sudden death can be, or how a seemingly small "mistake" can lead to tragedy. Maybe they avoid driving now. Maybe they avoid drinking. Maybe one of them has their own near-death experience, which leads them to be angry that Scotty was taken while they survived. But Colleen doesn't do any of this. in fact, Patrick and Grace are hardly characters, they're more so used as obstacles between Kenna and Diem (which is also unfortunate for the fact that Diem seems to be Kenna's only motivation - not setting things right with Scotty's parents, or really any work to right her wrongs, she just wants to see her daughter, disregarding everyone else's wants and needs). And lastly, Ledger. Boy, you can do so much with a character whose best friend died. Especially if their friend died because of an action committed by someone else important to the friend. If Colleen let her characters have flaws, or be morally grey (or at least framed that way, they definitely all do dubious things), we could've had so much more for Ledger in this story. There's so much you can do to make Scotty's death really meaningful here - maybe he and Ledger had a falling out that wasn't resolved before he died. Maybe Ledger was jealous of how much time Scotty was spending with Kenna, and now feels like Kenna pulled Scotty away from him until she killed him. But Ledger is just there to: 1. be conventionally attractive, 2. hate Kenna, 3. be loyal to Scotty's parents 4. be CoHo's mouthpiece - and yes, points 2 and 3 change, but not in any meaningful way. Colleen could've maybe had Ledger start to see Kenna as the woman Scotty loved, maybe Scotty used to talk about her and how much he loved her, and maybe that starts to factor in to Ledger's opinion of her. Maybe, despite all that, he stays loyal to Patrick and Grace until Kenna puts in a monumental amount of effort to set things right. No - Ledger, like everyone else, makes decisions because it's the part in the book where that decision has to be made for the sake of the plot - Colleen just pushes everything in the direction she wants the plot to go, without earning any of it. Almost nothing is based on a consistent collection of traits and motivations, driving a cause-and-effect narrative. And the little character we do get is always explored in the most surface-level possible way, with the reader's intelligence insulted by how many times the characters repeat their one goal or thought - Ledger constantly saying (essentially), 'I'm conflicted. I don't know whose side to be on', or Kenna going, 'I want to see my daughter. There is tension between myself and other characters, because they won't let me see my daughter.' All the things a real writer could do with CoHo's premises. They could give us such yummy writing to chew on. But no, it's in *her* hands, and she's somehow a famous and established author.
I feel like this story would be way better if Kenna was written to be the bad guy and Ledger was not interested in her, just trying to keep her away from Diem. Kenna has all the potential to be a delusional unreliable narrator but CoHo insists on writing "romance" instead of psychological thriller.
I love it when you talk about your sobriety. I've been an alcoholic for many years and it's something I've never been able to manage for more than a year at a time. I find you inspirational ❤
oh my god her portrayal of sobriety was driving me insane and i was so happy and relieved when you chimed in as a sober person!! im sober and in recovery and i cant imagine ANYONE i know going and moping in a bar, period. let alone paying $12 for a glass of wine. its so fault in our stars, so obviously written by someone who doesnt understand sobriety or addiction
less than 10 minutes in and wondering what kind of man verbally expresses his hatred for roadside memorials 😭 like that’s such a specific and lowkey evil thing to openly hate lmfao
It's so weird that Kenna keeps acting like she knows what Scotty would want. First of all, Scotty's family knew him longer and probably also think they know what he would want Maybe that's one of the many reasons they stay away, because they think he wouldn't want them to interact with the person who killed him. Also, don't you think Scotty would want her to apologize to his parents, and not traumatize them by showing up out of the blue. And maybe Scotty would like a cross if it would comfort his mother. It's just funny that apparently what Scotty wants in her mind is exactly what she wants.
I don't think CoHo understands how absolutely devastating an event like that could be in the lives of the ones who lost their son in a way such as this. In the village I grew up in, there happened a somewhat similar incident. My neighbor's son, his best friend and another friend went out to party in a disco in the next town. They had a number of drinks and by the end of the night, they were proper drunk. Still, instead of either calling a taxi or straight up walking home (which would have been around 1-2 km, not smart), they got in the neighbor's son's car and drove back. He was the driver, the best friend was in the backseat without his seatbelt on and the other friend in the passenger seat. Eventually, the neighbor's son crashed into a house and the momentum sent the car across the street. The best friend got thrown out of his seat and through the windshield of the car. If I remember correctly, he was instantly dead, but the neighbor's son still tried to do CPR until the ambulance arrived. He stayed at the crash site, as did the other friend. This happened over a decade ago. As far as I know, he never drove a car again and had to go through therapy for a very long time. I have no idea where he is now, but that crash and the tragedy is still brought up from time to time in the village. People remember. The dead boy's (because they were all around 18-20 years old) family remembers their son. What CoHo did here is so incredibly disrespectful. Imagine actually trying to make people feel bad for a drunk driver, who left her lover to die (or dead) without even trying to get help. This book is absolutely vile.
So... Did Kenna know she was pregnant when she was drunk, high, drove to her boyfriend's death? And no early miscarriage from all the trauma? Not to be that person, but is any of that ever aknowledged? Did she know yet?
I just made a similar comment! The whole video I was expecting that to be addressed but when it never came up I was like "so Kenna really just got that intoxicated and drove AND was pregnant?? And we're just supposed to be super cool with all that??"
Having given birth and loving my daughter(10) so much, knowing the love a mom has for their baby.. I wouldn’t have been so fast to forgive Kenna over that letter. That’s just insane. Sounded like excuses and no accountability! Also, having lost a lot of people due to drunk driving, texting and driving, or just horrific car accidents(lived in a small town with rough roads and hills), I get accidents happen. I wouldn’t consider what she did murder, but it’s negligent as hell! Absolutely preventable. Having said that, I’ve been a dumbass kid drunk driving-.- really only once, and when I got sober the next day, I was so upset with my then bf(now husband, this was 12 years ago) for letting me drive… but that was my own fault🤷🏼♀️ had I taken his life or anyone else’s that night, especially from fleeing the scene… I can’t imagine trying to excuse that. Holy hell. Also, I lost my cousin a year ago in March, she was on a motorcycle with a guy who’d been drinking. She was a huge time people pleaser and everyone convinced her it would be okay, that he wasn’t drunk and blah blah blah. She died immediately. He died not long after. I do blame him, for being irresponsible. It’s heartbreaking, devastating, and horrible. She had 3 kids, who now have to grow up without their mom.
2:12:00 I agree with you about people not taking drunk driving seriously. When I was in grade 12 (final year of high school) there was a seminar warning about the dangers of drunk driving and my classmates spent the rest of the day joking about it because they believed it was so far fetched that a drunk driving accident would even happen. I left that seminar feeling slightly traumatized; I had been in a car accident a few months prior because someone sober was in too much of a hurry to stop at a red light, so I knew that no one is immune to car accidents. I've also known people who have gotten DUIs who have shown absolutely no remorse. They only care about how inconvenient it was to have their license suspended.
It could have been a really good book concept, if CoHo had bothered to do research and actually make an attempt at it. In the US especially, there are so many cases of mothers in prison being treated HORRENDOUSLY (though, usually it is Black women who fall victim the most). So many cases of awful and traumatic births without the correct care and assistance, with babies being taken away with practically no time for bonding (the limit being 24 hours - not nearly enough time, and it really can be emotionally traumatising). Plus, what is basically forced adoptions, as there is a limit to how long a child will stay in foster care before parental rights are terminated - if your sentence is longer than that, then that can happen. Especially since younger children are far more likely to be adopted than older ones, so if you have a newborn who's mother has a 10 year sentence, you'll want to get them adopted ASAP instead of bumping them around the foster system the entire time. Women who never see their kids again, and who can't find them even after release because sometimes the records are withheld (even if their crime really shouldn't warrant that sort of response). Even with things like drunk driving, it is something that over 5 years people can absolutely learn and change from, and you can still be capable of becoming a suitable parent who will love and care for their child. It's completely devastating, and it's easy to overlook and not care about because 'oh, well they're a criminal! serves them right!'. Even though I'm sure it's common knowledge by now that the justice system is not always fair, and a person can be a criminal but not a terrible, irredeemable person who deserves this lifetime of heartache. But, instead we get whatever this is, lol.
Wait, the grandparents got to raise this child for all her life but were okay with just calling her Diem? First thing I'd have said if I was one of them would be, "This monster who killed our son also gave her daughter an abysmal name, let's rectify that."
Bro i just wanna say the amount of happiness i get whenever you mention you being proudly sober is insane, im so proud of you stay strong ❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤
As if the drinking and driving while also being high wasn't bad enough, Kenna then had Scotty's child while in prison. So wouldn't that mean that she not only drove under the influence but also got inebriated while being pregnant?? Did the book ever explain that away like "oh, she didn't know she was pregnant at the time" or some bs like that? Because if not, that just adds another layer of Kenna being the biggest wad ever.
@@hexinthelilypond4213 oh lol, I probably missed that 😅 I listen to these videos at work so there's definitely some stuff that doesn't stick in my head haha
colleen’s “tactic” of making the protagonists guilt trip people (and the reader!) who dont want to and dont have to forgive them for the awful things they’ve done makes me so irrationally angry. It happens in November 9 with that guy’s dead mom arson sob story, in Verity with the justification of that dude’s murder of his wife, in Ugly Love with that man’s mistreatment of the female lead because of his trauma and probably most of her other books (no i cannot be bothered to remember any of these names)
Oh no, I'm dreading this... I used to like the name Kenna 😭 I guess it's heading for the same fate as Ebony after I read My Immortal. I hate it when bad writing ruins my favourite names.
No SA? She withheld her identity from him because she knew he wouldn't want to be with her if he knew. She withheld information because he wouldn't consent if he had it. That is totally SA.
1:33:00 - the shock I felt when I thought you were getting emotional over a Colleen Hoover book 😭 thank god it was just about ur takeaway, I hope it was delish 💗
2:07:06 The US is chock full of pigeons. Maybe she was imagining it in a state where there aren’t many since she never specified? Either way such a state does not exist
cheered when I saw this. Ripping into CoHo is one of my favorite RUclips genres but no one does it like you. i used to sell so many of them and I've always been curious what kind of shit was in there but refuses to read it myself. Truly community service here
YOU WATCH C-DRAMA???!!! As a Chinese girl, I already feel bad for you. 95% of C-dramas are just as messy and toxic as Colleen Hoover’s books😂 But yes, Chinese girls really like drinking hot water. It helps with period cramps and cold hands.
I hung out with some international students in college that were Chinese and they got me to try drinking hot water when I was feeling bad, worked wonders
There are definitely good C-dramas out there. About 10 great ones every year. But China pumps out 500+ new dramas yearly, so the chance of you bumping into a good show is very small. You probably need to check their IMDb ratings or ask around for some recommendations.
My Chinese drama recommendations: The Long Season (2023), Ripe Town (2023), The Knockout (2023), Mysterious Lotus Casebook (2023), An Ancient Love Song (2023), Wild Bloom (2022), Reset (2022), The Imperial Coroner (2021), The Bad Kids (2020), Nirvana in Fire (2015), Ruyi's Royal Love in the Palace (2018), Empresses in the Palace (2011) These dramas are all approved by my ADHD brain that can't tolerate boring shows lol
I wasn't looking at the screen when ALIZEE said the daughter's name for the first time, so I heard it as "DM" AKA "Direct Messaging" ... I was like what?!!!... tbh, I wouldn't be surprised if CoHo named a character like that.
I’m a paralegal here in the states - the custody situation is very unusual. The explicit goal of the family court system is to keep families together and to reunite children with their parents whenever and however possible (for better or for worse but that’s the general attitude). It is impossible for the state to terminate someone’s parental rights. This would be an enormous violation of rights and is impossible to do. This is a form that Kenna would have to sign and has every right, even being in prison and given her crimes, to refuse to sign. Additionally, a court would likely NEVER take into account the relationship between the people sharing custody. There are countless estranged people who shared custody of children, the courts prioritize (or at least try to prioritize) the needs and wellbeing of the child, not the adults. Lastly, I doubt a drunk driver would receive the lesser charge of manslaughter over the charge of negligent homicide. Either way, in 99% of cases these charges would be felonies, meaning the minimum prison time is 7.5 years. It is unlikely that someone whose actions resulted in a death would be released early after only 5 years. She wouldn’t even be eligible for parole. Colleen, spend less time researching wack names for your characters and more time researching an accurate depiction of the legal process.
If I ever prayed for anything, it'd be for Alizee. Also Kenna would have been a lot more sympathetic if Scotty had been driving and they had just blaned her for him drinking or going to the party
That scene where she buys a glass of wine but doesn't drink it reminds me so much of that guy in "the fault in our stars" who always had a cigarette with him but would never light it because it was a "metaphor"
Oh and the wanting to just smell the wine and turn away thing is taken from that James Fry (not sure if I spelled that right) book, A Million Little Pieces or something, that turned out not to be a true story. Apparently the book ends with him getting out of rehab, then ordering a drink, so you think he'll relapse, but then he sniffs it and just leaves it. Supposed to show how strong he's become or some bullshit.
I wrote a story about a married movie star who falls in love with the new nanny. I set it up like a reverse Fatal Attraction. He actually kidnaps her in the end.....yet people still complained that they didn't end up together. I blame Colleen and E L James for this! 😂
A highschool girl was drunk driving with her friends in my home town. She split the car nearly all the way in half going over 70mph in a 35mph zone and running into a traffic light pole. She got a high bail set by one judge but got sentinced by a different judge who gave her only 5 years. She killed all 4 of her friends who were in the car with her. She only had a broken arm. There were protests after they annouced her sentencing but nothing was done. The life of each teen only being worth a little over a year. The sentence she recieved is such a dishonor to the victims and their families. CoHo just brushed by all the damage her character did by drunk driving and she never even apologizes or is respectful to the families in any way. Its so disrespectful
Check out my ebook here! www.amazon.co.uk/Piers-Morgans-Vegan-Lover-Alizee-ebook/dp/B083GW1ZY9
How's the new book coming along?
Colleen’s obsession with service workers who turn out to be the owners really pisses me off. That woman couldn’t even fathom writing a working class love interest, everyone has to be secretly rich with no class consciousness
i never noticed that before but you're right
Flip the script on her and write about an owner that gets demoted to a service worker?
Would that be Holleen Coover?
I wonder if she took it from Dhar Mann or if he copied her...or maybe they're copying each other because most of HIS videos follow same path "this person you thought was beneath you was actually above you!" so the lesson about the respect is not "respect people because it's the right thing to do" but "respect people because you never know how useful they can be to you"
It’s very JK Rowling. Harry Potter had a lot of pseudo working-class people in it who are also rich or rich coded in another sentence
This literally sounds like an erotica trope.
Colleen’s male love interests are totally the type of guys to divorce you when you get diagnosed with cancer
Their the kind of men who mistake lust for love and when the woman doesn't look attractive anymore, their out of the door
@@Lemoncakelover678 oh absolutely
@@Lemoncakelover678 CoHo's books have huge halo affect. Like imagine if Kenna was ugly? Totally different story.
Nah, they don't divorce. They cheat 🙂 while they wait for you to die.
@@Lemoncakelover678they are or theyre*. They are nice, its their dog.
“Her face is a work of art” I choose to believe she looks like a Picasso painting. Explains why everyone reacts like that when they see her
😂
Why Does she have one eye on the side of her head? - Ah , Picasso ! 😆
I love this! 😂
LOLLLLLLL
“You uncultured swine! What are you lookin’ at, ya hockey puck?”
(I sincerely hope everyone’s childhood memories are clear enough to recognize this reference.)
If the Grandparents have full legal rights to DM, shame on them for not giving that kid a proper name. Every time I hear DM, I think of Direct Message.
They kept it because they thought Scotty gave her the name. They didn't know that he wasn't aware of the baby before he died
I know it's diem, like carpe diem, but every time I hear it I think of DM (dextromethorphan) the active ingredient in cough syrup.
lmao "let's go meet your mother, Dungeon Master"
The FIRST thing I would have done is change her name, like what the hell?
@@raemackinnonThat makes no sense because Kenna said that they were fighting for custody before Diem was born. Nobody knew she was pregnant until she was arrested so there's no way that Scotty would've picked the name.
Naming her kid Diem should've been enough justification to revoke her custody rights
When my sister was a teen, she was deep in a VC Andrews reading phase and wanted to have a daughter she planned to name "Heaven Leigh Dawn Lastname". Luckily, she had two boys
Diem. Linked to Carpe Diem. *Car* pe Diem.
A car accident endet any chance this girl had to have her parents as a family.
The part where Colleen was describing and justifying how Kenna wanted to kidnap her daughter for a week of fun literally made me gasp. My biological mother tried to do the same thing to me, i’m so traumatized I can’t even ride in a taxi and it happened when I was 6 (she threw me in a taxi and tried to take me back to her house, taxi driver called the police because I was screaming). i’m literally flabbergasted, I cannot believe she wrote that lmao
CoHo really needs to google stuff before writing. Because from what I know this is actually a pretty common situation kids experience with deadbeat parents or divorcees.
Im a little tired of people pretending like CoHo isnt an awful person or that she isnt actually into every aspect of her books. She IS the type of person to kidnap a child. Who knows, maybe something like this happened and thats why her son is a total creep?.
For someone who loves writing about trauma, Coho doesn’t understand it very well. I especially dislike how her main characters can get away with things that would be unforgivably awful if a side character did them.
@@kul2130 i dont know much about her personal life, but i like stupid gossip like the next person: what did her son do?
@@sueellentony9404 he was accused of SA
The termination of parental rights is not something a judge gets to decide in a criminal case, its a civil matter. Kenna's rights were not terminated because she went to prison, they were terminated because at no point in the 5 years she was in prison did she reach out to her daughter, at all. Diem's grandparents petitioned for the termination of parental rights on grounds of abandonment. If our heroine had made good faith efforts to reach out to her child she could have a case against the grandparents because she would still have parental rights and they were deliberately keeping the child away given that all communications involving prisoners is monitored she'd have a paper trail. But Kenna's an idiot and CoHo refuses to use Google to look up the laws regarding this. Also, the state (doesn't matter which) will do back flips while sacrificing a goat to summon Satan to justify keeping a child with their mother, Kenna being the worst is why she doesn't have rights to her daughter and honestly it should stay that way.
The way you're just spot on. Why does Hoover insist on not being a good writer. She absolutely hates the genre she's been pigeonholed into.
@ville__ are you okay?
thank u so much for commenting this
I was looking for a comment like this because as soon as I heard that part it made me incredibly annoyed. I don't know a lot about how child custody is worked out but I could tell CoHo was just bullshitting that whole segment. It made no god damn sense. I don't understand how people find it so difficult to use google and would much rather just make shit up.
Hahaha I came here looking for the. THATS NOT HOW CUSTODY WORKS comments . 😂😂😂
Okay, so, her bf and her get in a car crash. He's unresponsive. So she checks his pulse ON HIS MANGLED ARM, unsurprisingly doesnt find it, and then just leaves him in the middle of nowhere?
And we're expected to think she deserves to be a parent???? She's too irresponsible to be a parent when she cant even check on an adult she supposedly cares about.
Who cares about the pulse, SHE STILL CAUSED THE ACCIDENT. Why does CH think that redeems her at all??
Wait wasn't she drunk *and* high back when they crashed? Ofc she wouldn't know better than try ln whatever arm was available
Not excusing her for anything ofc, even more reason not to drive like that
I mean, it makes sense that she would have done that. She was drunk and high, and also presumably sustained injuries from the crash. I just think it’s weird that the conflict seems to stem from having left him behind instead of having caused the wreck???
Shock can make people do some nonsensical things. Its not that surprising.
Colleen Hoover is writing the wrong genre, in my opinion. Her novels would work a lot more if they were straight up thrillers, instead of romance.
It's a very common thing people have pointed out, like it'd be very interesting
everyone always says this, but the one thriller she did write wasn't even thrilling, I was bored to death while reading verity
@@mikomiko. did you really steal the comment directly above you?
@xorvictia their comment said something else when I commented, and they immediately changed it to mine when I commented. their original comment was also copying the person above theirs, so no i did not
she should write thrillers for the filler sections in newspapers. nothing else
The fact that coho thinks repetition is a high brow writing technique is literally killing me
It can be if used correctly. But her repetition is soooo overused and takes away from the point she’s try to emphasize. It just sounds dumb lol
reminds me of how I tried to write when I was 16... Needless to say it was terrible lmao
@@GloomyFish I’m sure it had at least some merit for a 16 year old.
Repetition is great... WHEN USED SPARINGLY, COLLEEN. Throwing it around at any opportunity makes the writing sound like my short stories for English class in year 7.
One of my professors told me that repetition doesn't equal redundancy. Of course, the context was reading a book in the course before I even attended college, so it doesn't apply here.
I love how coho characters go through insane trauma but stay in their live love laugh mindsets. They act like the most stressful thing they've ever experienced was being responsible for a bottle of water.
That’s actually not super unrealistic. It’s a fairly common coping mechanism, and one that I use often. If you pretend everything is fine and lovely, maybe you’ll feel like it is. Fake it ‘till you make it
Yeah but at some point you'll need to grieve and CoHo makes painfully plain characters not capable of having hobbies let alone feel such complex feelings@@JuliaMarieH
CoHo married young and she has had no experience with relationships, it shows.
@@JuliaMarieHstop defending one of the most terrible writers active at the moment. You know for a fact that Coho did not write her characters that way on purpose
@@maddieb.4282i think they were just trying to correct the idea that its unrealistic. also a lotta people have theorized that she bases a lotta her works on her own trauma that shes basically never coped with well, and thus has basically gaslit herself into thinking it was actually all fine and romantic. It Ends With Us even suggests in the very start dedications page that her dad had been abusive, esp to her mom, and yet she still tries to ‘dedicate’ the book to him as if he were simply flawed and not actually a total piece of shit
so wait our main character drunk alcochol, knowing she arrived in the car/took car to a place she knew she'd be having a drink in, and then drove too fast, caused a car accident and then fled the scene leaving her fiance to die on the side of the road...she gave birth to a child and just never even TRIED to contact her(I know the grandparents didn't want to bring Diem for visists but like...she could've tried calling or writing letters. she didn't). and then she got out and the first things she did was to destroy her victim's memorial and then go to a bar to buy a glass of wine for what basically was an ego trip. and she did the latter(spending money) before she even got a job, when every penny counted....she then knowingly hooked up with her dead fiance's BF. and we're supposed to feel bad for her? we're supposed to root for her?
But, do you understand? She’s the MAIN CHARACTER so everything she did was right.
It's mind blowing. Kenna is an enormous selfish entitled pos and Ledger is awful. If I was the grandparents, I'd move and not tell anyone where we were going. Or get a restraining order against both of them. If Ledger wants to disrupt the peace in my home and re-traumatize the family over his boner for my son's murderer, he can have her and gtfo. Kenna should go back to jail and do another 5 years too. The first 5 didn't teach her anything.
But her face looks like a piece of art and she is quirky !!
Nope. Doesn't make sense to me either. 🤷🏻♀️
So… I was listening to this video as a podcast while working (not looking at the video…) and I just found out through this comment that her daughters name is diem, not dm(like direct message or dungeon master from d&d) 😭😭😭😭
Coho why the weird names😭😭😭😭
But Alizee, IT HAPPENS TO THE BEST OF US. :|
It’s honestly so wild that Colleen, the Supreme Boy Mum, wants us to hate Scotty’s parents for being upset that their son died. Like she literally used Miles’ son dying as the justification for why he treated Tate like utter shit, but they’re unreasonable for grieving their son
But hey I guess grief is only a good reason for being rude if they’re hot.
Which book/story are those two from again? With the god-awful names, similar characters and same shitty plot, all of these characters are starting to coalesce together into a massive blob and I can barely keep track of it.
@@Saphia_ Miles & Tate are from Ugly Love. Better known as the book where the stepsibling couple says & I quote: We both laugh at our son's big balls right before the car crash. Tate's not the stepsister girlfriend though, she's Miles' regular hook-up turned wife
@@Nathi98 Ohhh. I don't know what it says about CoHo's writing skills that I remembered this story only because of the line you quoted.
@@Nathi98hookup turned wife... I'm having an aneurysm over here rememberibg that goddamn book oml
Yeah but Miles is a main character so he deserves more sympathy
Kenna contemplating kidnapping her daughter and planning this super fun day for her and thinking her daughter would love it unironically made me think of Natalia Taylor talking about when her father kidnapped her when she was a child and took her to an amusement park and how scared and confused she was. Obviously her circumstances are different, but the fact that the narrative in the book doesn't have Kenna think, "nah, I'm being crazy, of course I could never do that, that'd be awful," is so fucking bizarre to me. She doesn't think about what's best for the daughter she supposedly cares so much about, it's all "me me me." I genuinely don't understand how Colleen wrote Kenna the way she did and thought that she sounded at all sympathetic.
There's even a line where she acknowledges that she only wants to visit her daughter for herself to feel better, not because she actually cares for her daughter and yet we're still suppose to want her and her daughter to reunite when the thing she needs to reunite with is therapy
@@Lemoncakelover678 If only this was a different book with a different writer. I would actually love to read a book written from the perspective of a narcissistic deadbeat parent who always believes they're the victim.
@@suitdoggy4707 Sadly, we put more thought and care into Colleen’s plot and characters than she does. Of all the books I’ve read of hers and the detailed reviews on the books I haven’t/won’t read, I think her biggest flaw is that she is a LAZY writer. You can see it with how quickly she pumps out these books with these complicated themes, subjects and plots and she seems more concerned with titillating the reader than actually taking the time to do research on shit like PTSD, SA, neglectful/narcissistic parents, abuse, what prison is like for a young person let alone a young mother, the death of a child. All of these are from her books and all of them are rightfully criticized for being clumsy. I think she could write something pretty decent if she would just…ask herself why she wants to discuss these subjects in these books and treat those subjects with the care they deserve. She can’t do that if she publishes a book every 6 months. It’s so frustrating.
i’m so confused about how he didn’t recognize her. you’ve never seen a mugshot of the woman who killed your best friend? he even says something about her not looking remorseful in court? how does he know that if this story is the first time he’s ever seen her?
Good point
She probably wasn't "sexy miserable " and just regular miserable.
Even moreso, did they never meet prior? What kind of bestie hasn't met your significant other?
@@MaddieMisanthropeor hasn't even seen a picture with them in it!
Every CoHo book has two stories: the one we read, and the terrifying one from a side character's POV.
Imagine if this story were from the grandparents' POV. A+ thriller right there
...imagine if Kenna wasn't at fault for Scotty's death and just like a witness or something. Like if Scotty was mauled by a bear and she ran away. All of this story could make sense. Yes, the parents could still be mad, but reasonably, the only thing you're doing against a bear is getting eaten or mauled. Things could have been so much less icky.
Or if scottie told her to leave or she had a head injury or even if she was so deep in shock she wasnt even aware of anything happening around her would of been better
even if she had just had the accident going above the speed limit and him being actually dead right away.
Then it's a mistake that is more excusable. Drunk driving, for most of us, is much more of a hard line than going a few mph to fast.
I imagined them getting in the wreck and then a bear manifesting from the woods and mauling him right after and then I realized that's not what you meant lmao
aw shit here we go again
I come here for her not hoover. I do it for her!
@@neverland436 that's the only way to get thru a coho book 😵💫
@@lilysiandaza4296 lol, I actually work at a bookstore and I'm responsible for the booktok and classics (kinda ironic i know) sections. I help with recommendations and book descriptions for my section and these videos give me an idea of what I'm working with without having to read all the books.
Once again, CoHo has written a book about a horrible person, doing horrible things and pretending that they're actually a misunderstood soul and the giant red flags and toxic traits being romanticized aren't that bad. She can miss me with this bullshit. 😮💨
@ville__ I'm sorry, who are you again? And what does this have to do with my comment?
@@mikankitsune0440it's a bot that goes on a bunch of female RUclipsr comment sections.
@@grandempressvicky6387 Ah, gotcha. I though it might be, but I wanted to make sure it wasn't someone being extra ridiculous.
As a society we tend to associate virtues to pretty/hot people........the way Ledger insists that the fmc is kind and selfless when she has literally not done anything to show that......obviously coho lacks the depth to make such social commentary.....but i feel that would be an amazing angle to explore
If I thought for one second that CoHo was writing these shitty people on purpose & that we weren't supposed to like them, I'd maybe think she was doing something interesting (like purposefully writing in the woman-centric romance category books full of terrible people to reflect the terrible people filled books of beloved (by men) authors like John Updike--so satire) but it's clear she is not.
Imagine grieving over your son and protecting your granddaughter who’s mom is trying to force herself into your home to grab her child who she never bothered to contact for 5 years😭 especially after killing your son for driving irresponsibly
ALSO her having fantasies of kidnapping said granddaughter and probably traumatizing her
Being a responsible grandparent is kinda evil these days. Modern morality.
If this was by the grandparents perspective, this would've been a horror novel
Then being labelled as a villan....😭😭😭😂😂😂😂
And abandoning him! She not only drunk drive she then poorly checked his pulse before just up and leaving. I think the grandparents are still being too nice.
This whole novel is the epitome of the sentiment "if you can't forgive and forget, then you're WORSE than you're abuser!" Except dialed up to eleven with "and make it into a heroic story about how your abuser was right the WHOLE TIME and didn't deserve any of this!"
ikr? Ohh bohoo innocent baby kenna for having to deal with the consequences of her own actions
tough luck shouldn't have killed someone then
Same with NC parents, maybe should have been better to your kids if you wanted a relationship with them...
CoHo going on record saying she didn’t like romance until after publishing and being a true crime fan first retroactively makes her work feel like she’s throwing wild plots in her books to entertain herself through a genre she finds boring to read. Ironically, what she keeps doing is remaking soap operas; a popular type of romance fiction
EDIT, since my replies aren’t coming up: To answer people replying with “why write romance, then?” CoHo became a romance author by accident. She always wrote stories as a child, and wrote a romance for her family to read on Kindle. She published it on Amazon and it became a bestseller. Most likely, romance writing was a grift for her until she dropped her prejudices and found romance stories she enjoyed.
This explains the gore at the beginning of her books lol
I just wonder why she’s not writing crime and mystery novels then. You would think she’d be quite alright at that if you take her “romance” plots into consideration, but on the other hand Verity WASNT good so maybe she just isn’t a good story teller no matter how you twist it.
That's why those books read so spiteful and resentful against romance I guess she's literally aromantic coded lol
it’s bc she’s not like the other girl but she actually enjoy romance. but i’m sure she thinks other ppl romance are too snowflake but hers are different like beautiful messy chaotic not like the other books romance. she’s just a pick me
@ville__ Why don't you ever copy my comments? I'm a little sad now...
Everyone responds to trauma differently but I find it weird that Kenna's trauma is centered on alcohol and not driving. I was in a bad highway accident when I was 14 (I was a passenger) and that made learning to drive on the highway very hard. To this day, I get anxious sometimes on a busy highway (as a passenger or a driver).
Like Kenna doesn't want to get drunk again, I get that, but I feel like it'd be realistic for her to also never want to get behind a wheel again either.
I also found that strange! I used to have panic attacks if it started snowing while I was in a car, passenger or driver, because I had a bad accident due to snow as a teenager. It is a little weird that she fixated on the alcohol, not the driving/being in a car.
@@ashannaredwolf8485yeah! Honestly, I wouldn’t fixate too much on this if a character responded to a traumatic event in such a way in an overall well-written story by the author I trust, since yes, people do have completely different responses to traumatic events, but in a Colleen Hoover book?.. yeah, I’m not gonna give the author a benefit of the doubt, it’s just off.
Hope you're alright!
There is a sharp turn in the town next to mine where my mum, a friend & I ended up in a ditch cuz of an ice patch on the road (my mum was going WAY under the limit). We were fine, just shaken. For the following 8 to 10 years, I felt a knot in my stomach everytime we passed it
I'm over it by now, but I was still cautious frequenting it (it's now closed due to multiple road constructions)
@@Nathi98 I'm glad you guys were ok! Me and everyone in the car were ok. We were very lucky and it was a long time ago, I'm 31 now. It's crazy how one event can alter your brain chemistry for years.
@@FrumiousMing8
Just a smidge of bad luck or miscalculation & BOOOM you're screwed
Alizee and Rachel Oates need to collab. They're both your unmarried aunts, but one will ask you how school has been going (they know actually what you're studying because they love you) and the other will slide you 20$ and teach you new swearwords (they love you just as much)
yeah Rachel never stops swearing, it's impressive
Omg yes 😂 adding Reads with Rachel would be awesome too. So. Much. Snark.
@@noth1ng5idThe universe would IMPLODE if those three reviewed a book together
Your story about Indian takeaway was more compelling and emotional than anything coho could ever hope to write
Colleen Hoover is proof that you can be a best selling author and NEVER be an actual writer.
It makes me feel like i could write a better book 🤣
Her books are unironically the seniors drafts high school teachers give you as an example on how to not write a story
@@Lemoncakelover678 That is probably the most apt description of her books that I have seen thus far. Truthfully.
I hate the "a child needs a mother in their life", Diem doesn't need a MURDERER in her life
What she needs is a real name
i honestly wish there was an insane plot twist where ledger caused the accident all along out of raging jealousy, like he cut the breaks or something after stalking them to the lake and then when scotty died he stepped in to replace him in his family and then when kenna got back he replaced scotty for her too
that would’ve been a way more interesting book than this dreck
Would of been so much better
Ledger spiked Scotty and Kenna's drinks that night for a prank. He didn't realise they'd be driving afterwards. He wants everyone to treat the incident as a forgivable accident, because then he'd be getting their forgiveness without ever having to confess what he did.
@@wendyheatherwood he reveals it at the end in an unhinged letter to Scotty. Kenna reads it and has a panic attack, book ends on a cliff hanger
@meriel5765 nah, ita CoHo[e] (wow 12 year old boy humour yass) we're talking about. Kenna reads the letter and feels sorry for Ledger. Why? Idk ask CoHo.
If someone was actually in a serious car crash that ended with a death, it would be surprising for them to put their feet on the dash after. Like have you never heard or seen what happens if you're in a crash with your legs up there. Even a minor little bump can be life changing by having your feet up there. Like a lot of people have the thought " It will never happen to me" but the person already knows that it isn't true. And you think the dude would be sensitive aswell due to losing his best friend. Like car safety would be always in the front of his mind. Like most people I know who are very strict with car safety, they often have a trauma filled reason for it but even if they didn't, it's best to be strict with car safety e.g belts always on, no feet on the dashboard. I wouldn't allow someone to put their feet on the dashboard while I drove and I've only been in minor accidents.
This! It's not quirky, you're gonna break your whole pelvis and possibly worse
New ending: right after everyone forgives each other and happiness descends, Kenna suddenly remembers the accident more completely and it turns out Ledger was there, he drove because they were drunk and he wasn't, but he wanted Kenna for himself so he crashed the car on purpose, made it so Scotty would get the worst of it, put unconscious Kenna into the driver's seat so she'd think she did it, made sure Scotty was injured enough to die, and left. Then waited out her prison sentence while staying close to Diem knowing that she would come back for her and her could have her.
THAT would have been a story.
Don’t forget Kenna would still end up with ledger because of true love
Ooh what a fun twist. I wish Coho just committed and wrote thrillers/horror novels instead of continuing to try romance
"Only Siths and Coho protagonists deal is absolutes" took me RIGHT OUT 😂
I was 11 I heard about a drunk driver who drove up on the sidewalk and killed a 3-year old girl. I didn't know anyone involved, but it was fairly close to where I was living. The driver got 7 years in prison. And for the first time in my life I felt true rage over injustice.
Every time the subject of drunk driving comes up I remember that little girl.
Kenna is not a victim. And CoHo is a hack.
Ok but let’s talk about saintly Scotty making the decision to get drunk w his gf by a lake and then deciding not only to put his slightly less intoxicated gf behind the wheel but to get in the car with her. Like both of these ‘beloved protagonists’ are criminals the only difference is one of them is dead. Only tolerable character is the unnecessary and very minimally present girl who annoys Kenna while she’s crying
And the cat & Kenna's home owner
Thank you for trudging through another Hoover book so that we don't have to. WHY does she insist on giving her characters ludicrous names? I mean, Diem, seriously?!
All this time I thought her name is literally DM and was thinking why would someone find it powerful instead of laughing out loud
It will make sense if we get another one called Carpe at some point...
that's probably why she lost all custody rights tbh
It's because she wants her characters to stand out, according to herself. They do stand out, just not in the way she wants them to. 😂
Every time I hear that guy's name... Ledger or whatever it is just reminds me of the actor Heath Ledger. 🤣
Long time lurker here, I just wanted to say: Never stop talking! Your observations on these crappy books are not only as searing as a flame thrower but incredibly insightful. It's easy to state a book is sh***y and problematic and a waste of space but not everyone is able to bring across what the problematic thing is and why it is problematic in the first place. Kudos for that. Also, as being from a non-English speaking country, I like your accent. 😁
And now I'm off to dutifully subscribe...
i dont think i could stop ever yapping even if i tried. thank you!
this book feels like it needed a few things to change to... at least make the protagonist less annoying to read about.
1. Kenna needed to be an alcoholic. Scotty's death should be the reason she is now going full teetotaler after having been a party girl who used to think she was invincible.
2. She needed to have written letters, sent phone calls, literally done *anything* to make the reader believe she wants to see her daughter. Five years in prison with nothing? I don't believe she ever wanted to see Diem at all. Make the prison *never send her letters out*. Throw them right in the bin. Make that a plot point and a twist, so they're like "but you never even wrote" and they call her a liar for being like "yes i did i wrote all the time".
3. Just... god the opening scene is unbearable, first impressions are everything and Colleen wastes this one on making Kenna an absolute terror to Scotty's family. Horrendous. Leave flowers or something. Show remorse. Idfk.
If Ledger went to the trial… how did he not recognize Kenna? Also, wouldn’t her mugshot have been blasted everywhere after such an accident? How does he have no idea who she is at first? Make it make sense.
Well he's such a feminist, and he doesnt think we should reduce wahmen to just their looks, so he didnt really pay that much attention in court, because once he notices a wahmen is pretty he stops noticing she's pretty if you know what im saying? (Please read in that lilting voice miss yeezy does 😂)
....Plot Armor?
alizee, i just want you to know that i felt my stomach almost drop out of my ass when i saw the name collen hoover, i thought i had finally been free from hearing about her.
haha I'm sorry
I mean that's ONE of the ways one can feel about Coleen Hoover.
There are MOVIES of her books in production right now, and I hate it.
It's honestly a breath of fresh air she didn't write SA in this one
@@Nathi98 When the bar is so low for a writer that NOT writing fucking SA as romantic is something to praise…how the actual fuck is she so popular?
I thought that the twist would be that Scott was driving, drunk, and they were arguing because she wanted an abortion which is also why she'd been drinking.
Then when the police arrested her she took the blame out of some CoHo-logic guilt for not immediately wanting the baby and to make the dead man not look bad for the kid, and his family, since almost killing his girlfriend and their fetus would "tarnish his memory".
But the twist was that she didn't do any of it on purpose...?
This is the only CoHo book I read (but I know about her other books “twists”. And I couldn’t believe the twist of this book of she didn’t mean to kill him and it was an accident. I thought it was obvious she didn’t do it on purpose a better twist would have been your idea
@@pam9919 I agree it was so obvious. Even her jail sentence; I mean if people thought she did it on purpose she'd been charged with second degree murder. Such an utterly pointless twist to add.
My best friend was murdered by a drunk driver. The idea that Coleen Hoover could try to excuse it and make something romantic out of it… I don’t want to wish ill on anyone, but if she’d ever experienced something that gut-wrenchingly horrible, she’d realize how horrible of a human being she is.
Thank you for the take on drunk drivers 🙌 I work for the dmv and have major issues with drunk drivers getting their licenses back period, let alone when they cause deaths.
My mom's best friend was killed by a drunk driver. One of my friends was killed by a drunk driver. Both drivers are free&clear now. It's disgusting
Why is Colleen Hoover obsessed with writing love interests that are horrible pieces of shit. Why would I ever want these characters to fall in love or have good things happen to them?
as a person who works with kids (i’m a pk teacher), i can guarantee you diem would not trust kenna so easily. kids are actually very suspicious!!!! with everyone. it took like three weeks for the kids to even notice my presence at all lol
Kenna crashing and leaving Scotty for dead while drunk driving, then later having sex with his best friend and laughing about how Scotty is "mad" that Ledger's better in bed than he was, all while contemplating kidnapping her basically unknown daughter is some genuinely evil shit jfc Colleen
no way someone on the highway wouldn’t have stopped for him. bro, what? people report accidents when they see them happen. i have no idea what world colleen hoover lives in, but no way a car accident victim would go 6 hours without help.
I can actually prove your arguement right with another recent event (long comment sorry):
A car to bike crash happened where I live. My mum & I heard it. We both got up to look & immediately the injured party was surrounded by 6 people.
100 & 112 were called before I was even across the road, which only took me less than 3 minutes. My mum too would have aided but she has Covid so she did not want to take the risk
I myself went down & asked politely the fysiotherapist practice to loan us some cones. I remember from the previous one that they had some in their keep. I went to place them around the biker.
I also placed the bike in a bike park spot across the T-intersection & handed the bikekeys back
Other people gave her coats & blankets because it was freezing until the ambulance arrived. We were planning to ask to give one also but the ambulance arrived before I could ask
As far as I know, the biker had some hip trouble but nothing too bad. Biker did not hit their head on the ground so that's good too
THERE IS NO WAY SCOTTY WOULD BE LEFT DESOLATE AFTER A CAR CRASH FOR 6 HOURS MISSING AN ARM
@@Nathi98this story actually makes me happy although I feel bad that people were hurt, it’s nice to see folks cooperating for the good of someone else
I’ve actually read a first person account of a woman who crashed in a ditch and because trees and bushes covered the evidence of her being there, her husband and law enforcement didn’t find her for multiple days although they knew she was missing and were actively looking for her. Very scary and rare situation but that’s the only scenario I can think of where a car accident would go unresponded to
Somehow the mc not wanting to be given a cat by her landlord permanently solidified my dislike of another Colleen mc. Like yea she was already a shitty person for killing her boyfriend in a drunk driving incident, but now this idiot also outright dislikes cats? Trash mc. Colleen’s talent at destroying the mc’s relationship with the reader within the first chapter is mind boggling.
I mean, her situation wasn't really ideal for owning and rasing a kitten.
Just out of prison, "new" to the city, nojob, a tiny place to live in. That's not necessarily the best circumstances to get a kitten, especially the no job part, because vet visits etc can get really expensive.
But that's the only thing I could consider OK about all of the book.
@@TarisLunayeah, I feel it's justified. I never had any pets growing up bc we were really poor. I have money saved up now and I don't think I'll loose my job but I'm still too worried if I have enough living space and enough money to properly care for a pet.
You cant be a horrible person AND dislike fuzzy aggressive creatures. Like pick a toxic trait you can’t have both
It was so weird because the cat doesn't really add anything to the story. It was just a quirky thing a minor character did.
I'm personally more concerned why the landlord would opt to give a woman fresh out of prison for irresponsibly drunk driving and killing her boyfriend a precious little kitten. This woman has shown zero ability to be responsible for another life, the kitten doesn't deserve to be a guinea pig.
My dad’s best friend in uni killed his brother while drunk driving. He crashed the car and he lived while his brother in the passenger seat died. I can’t fathom how difficult that must have been for the family. Knowing of this tragedy has kept me from driving under the influence my whole life.
Kenna never having a real moment of self self-loathing or self-reflection is almost impressive. Just once I want a co-ho protagonist to have an actual real conversation with someone.
I'm wondering if Colleen Hoover writes these books out of sheer boredom and thinks it's all crap but the money is good or if she genuinely thinks she's writing romantic stories with good characters
ok but the whole thing about “Grace and Patrick should forgive Kenna for killing their son because she’s sorry, and they’re being really mean to her” is like…I’ve lost a family member in a drunk driving accident before, and you don’t have to forgive the drunk driver, regardless of whether they’re alive or dead. Nobody gets to tell you “well you should just forgive them, they said they’re sorry,” because they KILLED SOMEONE that you care about deeply. Even just losing someone to natural causes, an illness or an accident that doesn’t involve another person fucks you up really badly, but when it was entirely preventable and happened because of the choices of someone else? And if that person is ALIVE, and has not apologized for the accident or tried to reach out to you AT ALL? Not to mention how this is going to affect Diem as she gets older. Having to tell a kid “yeah your dad died in a drunk driving accident before you were born” is already very difficult but when the drunk driver is the kid’s mom? That’s gonna be one hell of a conversation to unpack when Diem is in therapy as an adult. Colleen Hoover characters go to therapy challenge
My best friend's fiance was killed by a drunk driver who fled the scene and left him in the snow.
The whole premise of this book makes me furious on that alone.
Your poor friend omg. I hope she's been able to find some peace and happiness
@@emmyrose233 it's been a few years now, so thankfully they've had the time to heal. Still, I think about that night sometimes and how devastating it was... makes me want to tear this book to shreds.
That is so, so, so upsetting. I’m so sorry for your friend and hopefully they can live a somewhat normal life after experiencing something like that
the main character stealing her ex's mom's cross out of the ground is like in curb your enthusiasm when larry kept stealing flowers from the memorial site
this book is even more insane when you know that coho used to be a social worker
Yikes 😬🙄😮💨
What boggles my mind is that Kenna is on parole and it's not mentioned anywhere. The restraining order would've sent her to prison... 🤔 It's almost like Coho doesn't do any research for her works, and it's even more hilarious knowing that she was a social worker so this stuff should be like bread and butter to her
As an American, I feel obligated to assure you that we, too, have a metric crapload of pigeons. Seeing one in your yard would not be like spotting a unicorn.
How can someone be this prolific in writing books, and _still_ not get how problematic the content of said books is?
It's like the Upton Sinclair quote. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
@@Meager02 ...actually, that fits her career perfectly.
Because nobody fucking cares. It's fiction.
You people have bees in your brain.
I hope Scotty's ghost haunts everyone in this book for the rest of their days. The whole lot are traitors.
I can imagine Scotty looking at everyone with dead lifeless eyes, especially to ledger and kenna
This one is kind of frustrating. Because a mother who accidentally killed her fiance and is looking for redemption is a pretty good premise. But I don't think it ever could have worked as a romance book.
I know it's just a small detail of the book but I truly hate the way CoHo is trying so hard to portray a character as not racist by literally spelling it out in the least subtle way which not only feels weird and unnecessary but also makes me question if CoHo thinks having poc friends/employees just automatically makes someone not racist 💀
"Yeah I have a black colleague and from time to time I even say hello to him. I can not be racist" :P
Sizeable comment incoming (I wasn't going to be able to rest without performing a thorough analysis here):
The problem I've realised I have with CoHo, after watching all of Alizee's and Rachel Oates' videos on her books, is that she doesn't write like...well, a writer. Books generally have a constant cause-and-effect system going on, which takes into account character motivations (ideally ones that remain consistent), and pushes every character to where they need to be, in a way that feels natural.
Every detail in a CoHo book, however, appears to just be used as an excuse for plot points to happen.
We "needed" Kenna's past to be that she killed her partner in a drunk-driving incident, because she needs to be in a situation where people hate her for an action she committed. Which is fine as a *premise* for a book; but the problem is, Kenna is not a character whose traits and motivations led her to drive while drunk. Kenna is a character that happened to do so, so the plot can happen. She isn't an alcoholic. She doesn't have a tendency to be impulsive or reckless (well, one might argue she does, but it doesn't seem that Colleen intended to frame it that way). Kenna and Scotty were just irresponsible that one time, to allow for something dramatic to happen. Colleen has prioritised drama over using character to explore a theme, or build natural cause-and-effect.
And this is a pattern - Patrick and Grace, for example; you would expect the parents of someone who died tragically and senselessly to maybe be used (in a book) to maybe explore the idea of grief, or coming to terms with how sudden death can be, or how a seemingly small "mistake" can lead to tragedy. Maybe they avoid driving now. Maybe they avoid drinking. Maybe one of them has their own near-death experience, which leads them to be angry that Scotty was taken while they survived. But Colleen doesn't do any of this. in fact, Patrick and Grace are hardly characters, they're more so used as obstacles between Kenna and Diem (which is also unfortunate for the fact that Diem seems to be Kenna's only motivation - not setting things right with Scotty's parents, or really any work to right her wrongs, she just wants to see her daughter, disregarding everyone else's wants and needs).
And lastly, Ledger. Boy, you can do so much with a character whose best friend died. Especially if their friend died because of an action committed by someone else important to the friend. If Colleen let her characters have flaws, or be morally grey (or at least framed that way, they definitely all do dubious things), we could've had so much more for Ledger in this story. There's so much you can do to make Scotty's death really meaningful here - maybe he and Ledger had a falling out that wasn't resolved before he died. Maybe Ledger was jealous of how much time Scotty was spending with Kenna, and now feels like Kenna pulled Scotty away from him until she killed him.
But Ledger is just there to: 1. be conventionally attractive, 2. hate Kenna, 3. be loyal to Scotty's parents 4. be CoHo's mouthpiece - and yes, points 2 and 3 change, but not in any meaningful way. Colleen could've maybe had Ledger start to see Kenna as the woman Scotty loved, maybe Scotty used to talk about her and how much he loved her, and maybe that starts to factor in to Ledger's opinion of her. Maybe, despite all that, he stays loyal to Patrick and Grace until Kenna puts in a monumental amount of effort to set things right.
No - Ledger, like everyone else, makes decisions because it's the part in the book where that decision has to be made for the sake of the plot - Colleen just pushes everything in the direction she wants the plot to go, without earning any of it. Almost nothing is based on a consistent collection of traits and motivations, driving a cause-and-effect narrative. And the little character we do get is always explored in the most surface-level possible way, with the reader's intelligence insulted by how many times the characters repeat their one goal or thought - Ledger constantly saying (essentially), 'I'm conflicted. I don't know whose side to be on', or Kenna going, 'I want to see my daughter. There is tension between myself and other characters, because they won't let me see my daughter.'
All the things a real writer could do with CoHo's premises. They could give us such yummy writing to chew on. But no, it's in *her* hands, and she's somehow a famous and established author.
There is a writer who does this idea so much better. Night Road by Kristin Hannah
@@alexandriafermin4007 Always love a book recommendation. I’ll check it out (:
I feel like this story would be way better if Kenna was written to be the bad guy and Ledger was not interested in her, just trying to keep her away from Diem. Kenna has all the potential to be a delusional unreliable narrator but CoHo insists on writing "romance" instead of psychological thriller.
And when she does, she still decides to force boring smut and romance in for no reason
I love it when you talk about your sobriety. I've been an alcoholic for many years and it's something I've never been able to manage for more than a year at a time. I find you inspirational ❤
oh my god her portrayal of sobriety was driving me insane and i was so happy and relieved when you chimed in as a sober person!! im sober and in recovery and i cant imagine ANYONE i know going and moping in a bar, period. let alone paying $12 for a glass of wine. its so fault in our stars, so obviously written by someone who doesnt understand sobriety or addiction
less than 10 minutes in and wondering what kind of man verbally expresses his hatred for roadside memorials 😭 like that’s such a specific and lowkey evil thing to openly hate lmfao
also the ordering wine just to ignore it is giving augustus waters 😭
It's so weird that Kenna keeps acting like she knows what Scotty would want. First of all, Scotty's family knew him longer and probably also think they know what he would want Maybe that's one of the many reasons they stay away, because they think he wouldn't want them to interact with the person who killed him. Also, don't you think Scotty would want her to apologize to his parents, and not traumatize them by showing up out of the blue. And maybe Scotty would like a cross if it would comfort his mother. It's just funny that apparently what Scotty wants in her mind is exactly what she wants.
I don't think CoHo understands how absolutely devastating an event like that could be in the lives of the ones who lost their son in a way such as this.
In the village I grew up in, there happened a somewhat similar incident. My neighbor's son, his best friend and another friend went out to party in a disco in the next town. They had a number of drinks and by the end of the night, they were proper drunk. Still, instead of either calling a taxi or straight up walking home (which would have been around 1-2 km, not smart), they got in the neighbor's son's car and drove back. He was the driver, the best friend was in the backseat without his seatbelt on and the other friend in the passenger seat. Eventually, the neighbor's son crashed into a house and the momentum sent the car across the street. The best friend got thrown out of his seat and through the windshield of the car. If I remember correctly, he was instantly dead, but the neighbor's son still tried to do CPR until the ambulance arrived. He stayed at the crash site, as did the other friend.
This happened over a decade ago. As far as I know, he never drove a car again and had to go through therapy for a very long time. I have no idea where he is now, but that crash and the tragedy is still brought up from time to time in the village. People remember. The dead boy's (because they were all around 18-20 years old) family remembers their son.
What CoHo did here is so incredibly disrespectful. Imagine actually trying to make people feel bad for a drunk driver, who left her lover to die (or dead) without even trying to get help. This book is absolutely vile.
So... Did Kenna know she was pregnant when she was drunk, high, drove to her boyfriend's death? And no early miscarriage from all the trauma?
Not to be that person, but is any of that ever aknowledged? Did she know yet?
From the book it seems like she only learned she was pregnant in jail after Scotty’s death
I just made a similar comment! The whole video I was expecting that to be addressed but when it never came up I was like "so Kenna really just got that intoxicated and drove AND was pregnant?? And we're just supposed to be super cool with all that??"
Having given birth and loving my daughter(10) so much, knowing the love a mom has for their baby.. I wouldn’t have been so fast to forgive Kenna over that letter. That’s just insane. Sounded like excuses and no accountability! Also, having lost a lot of people due to drunk driving, texting and driving, or just horrific car accidents(lived in a small town with rough roads and hills), I get accidents happen. I wouldn’t consider what she did murder, but it’s negligent as hell! Absolutely preventable. Having said that, I’ve been a dumbass kid drunk driving-.- really only once, and when I got sober the next day, I was so upset with my then bf(now husband, this was 12 years ago) for letting me drive… but that was my own fault🤷🏼♀️ had I taken his life or anyone else’s that night, especially from fleeing the scene… I can’t imagine trying to excuse that. Holy hell. Also, I lost my cousin a year ago in March, she was on a motorcycle with a guy who’d been drinking. She was a huge time people pleaser and everyone convinced her it would be okay, that he wasn’t drunk and blah blah blah. She died immediately. He died not long after. I do blame him, for being irresponsible. It’s heartbreaking, devastating, and horrible. She had 3 kids, who now have to grow up without their mom.
2:12:00 I agree with you about people not taking drunk driving seriously. When I was in grade 12 (final year of high school) there was a seminar warning about the dangers of drunk driving and my classmates spent the rest of the day joking about it because they believed it was so far fetched that a drunk driving accident would even happen. I left that seminar feeling slightly traumatized; I had been in a car accident a few months prior because someone sober was in too much of a hurry to stop at a red light, so I knew that no one is immune to car accidents. I've also known people who have gotten DUIs who have shown absolutely no remorse. They only care about how inconvenient it was to have their license suspended.
It could have been a really good book concept, if CoHo had bothered to do research and actually make an attempt at it. In the US especially, there are so many cases of mothers in prison being treated HORRENDOUSLY (though, usually it is Black women who fall victim the most). So many cases of awful and traumatic births without the correct care and assistance, with babies being taken away with practically no time for bonding (the limit being 24 hours - not nearly enough time, and it really can be emotionally traumatising).
Plus, what is basically forced adoptions, as there is a limit to how long a child will stay in foster care before parental rights are terminated - if your sentence is longer than that, then that can happen. Especially since younger children are far more likely to be adopted than older ones, so if you have a newborn who's mother has a 10 year sentence, you'll want to get them adopted ASAP instead of bumping them around the foster system the entire time. Women who never see their kids again, and who can't find them even after release because sometimes the records are withheld (even if their crime really shouldn't warrant that sort of response). Even with things like drunk driving, it is something that over 5 years people can absolutely learn and change from, and you can still be capable of becoming a suitable parent who will love and care for their child. It's completely devastating, and it's easy to overlook and not care about because 'oh, well they're a criminal! serves them right!'. Even though I'm sure it's common knowledge by now that the justice system is not always fair, and a person can be a criminal but not a terrible, irredeemable person who deserves this lifetime of heartache.
But, instead we get whatever this is, lol.
That was beautifully put. I completely agree with you!
yeah, it could’ve actually been an interesting story with a lot to explore. it’s a pity
+++++++!!!!!!
Wait, the grandparents got to raise this child for all her life but were okay with just calling her Diem? First thing I'd have said if I was one of them would be, "This monster who killed our son also gave her daughter an abysmal name, let's rectify that."
Bro i just wanna say the amount of happiness i get whenever you mention you being proudly sober is insane, im so proud of you stay strong ❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤
thank you!!
As if the drinking and driving while also being high wasn't bad enough, Kenna then had Scotty's child while in prison. So wouldn't that mean that she not only drove under the influence but also got inebriated while being pregnant?? Did the book ever explain that away like "oh, she didn't know she was pregnant at the time" or some bs like that? Because if not, that just adds another layer of Kenna being the biggest wad ever.
The book did specify that she only found out she was pregnant after she’d been sentenced
@@hexinthelilypond4213 oh lol, I probably missed that 😅 I listen to these videos at work so there's definitely some stuff that doesn't stick in my head haha
colleen’s “tactic” of making the protagonists guilt trip people (and the reader!) who dont want to and dont have to forgive them for the awful things they’ve done makes me so irrationally angry. It happens in November 9 with that guy’s dead mom arson sob story, in Verity with the justification of that dude’s murder of his wife, in Ugly Love with that man’s mistreatment of the female lead because of his trauma and probably most of her other books (no i cannot be bothered to remember any of these names)
My brain keeps singing “Scotty doesn’t know” 😂
Alizee's waffling intros offer more value to Humanity than anything CoHo has ever written or ever could write.
ur welcome
Oh no, I'm dreading this... I used to like the name Kenna 😭
I guess it's heading for the same fate as Ebony after I read My Immortal. I hate it when bad writing ruins my favourite names.
I won’t stand for this my immortal slander 😩✋🏻
Oh, don't worry. Her name was spelled 'Enoby' enough times that I'm mostly convinced that's her actual name, and 'Ebony' is the misspelling. XD
@@WolfGoddess77 Obi-Wan Enoby
I'm still mad about the name Tarryn for the same reason
No SA? She withheld her identity from him because she knew he wouldn't want to be with her if he knew. She withheld information because he wouldn't consent if he had it. That is totally SA.
I mean if the male lead wanted he could even sue on the grounds of R*pe by deception.
CoHo seems to think men can’t be SA-ed by women. CoHo is an idiot.
Normally, sitting still for a CoHo book video would kill me, but I got six puzzles and a beginners crotchet kit for Christmas. Come at me.
I was watching a scary tik tok video but ran to experience true fear - Colleen Hoover's audacity
My favorite part of this book is Ledger had NO IDEA this was the ex-girlfriend who killed his best friend. 🙄
1:33:00 - the shock I felt when I thought you were getting emotional over a Colleen Hoover book 😭 thank god it was just about ur takeaway, I hope it was delish 💗
2:07:06 The US is chock full of pigeons. Maybe she was imagining it in a state where there aren’t many since she never specified? Either way such a state does not exist
EVERY TIME I have a college essay to write, Alizee comes to the rescue with a bad book review ✨️
cheered when I saw this. Ripping into CoHo is one of my favorite RUclips genres but no one does it like you. i used to sell so many of them and I've always been curious what kind of shit was in there but refuses to read it myself. Truly community service here
YOU WATCH C-DRAMA???!!! As a Chinese girl, I already feel bad for you. 95% of C-dramas are just as messy and toxic as Colleen Hoover’s books😂 But yes, Chinese girls really like drinking hot water. It helps with period cramps and cold hands.
I watch C dramas too, and the toxicity is real 😂
I hung out with some international students in college that were Chinese and they got me to try drinking hot water when I was feeling bad, worked wonders
There are definitely good C-dramas out there. About 10 great ones every year. But China pumps out 500+ new dramas yearly, so the chance of you bumping into a good show is very small. You probably need to check their IMDb ratings or ask around for some recommendations.
@@queenning28 Which is why I only watch the ones with very high ratings or someone I know has recommended
My Chinese drama recommendations: The Long Season (2023), Ripe Town (2023), The Knockout (2023), Mysterious Lotus Casebook (2023), An Ancient Love Song (2023), Wild Bloom (2022), Reset (2022), The Imperial Coroner (2021), The Bad Kids (2020), Nirvana in Fire (2015), Ruyi's Royal Love in the Palace (2018), Empresses in the Palace (2011)
These dramas are all approved by my ADHD brain that can't tolerate boring shows lol
You look STUNNING today. Also, thank you. My miserable little heart needed this today.
Wild that Kenna's mother made her life worse yet she can't accept that Diaz is better off without HER.
I wasn't looking at the screen when ALIZEE said the daughter's name for the first time, so I heard it as "DM" AKA "Direct Messaging" ... I was like what?!!!...
tbh, I wouldn't be surprised if CoHo named a character like that.
All I can think about is that one "Scotty Doesn't Know" song playing the background of this entire book
I refuse to read a CoHo book but somehow your reviews are peak entertainment. I respect your sacrifice
I’m a paralegal here in the states - the custody situation is very unusual. The explicit goal of the family court system is to keep families together and to reunite children with their parents whenever and however possible (for better or for worse but that’s the general attitude). It is impossible for the state to terminate someone’s parental rights. This would be an enormous violation of rights and is impossible to do. This is a form that Kenna would have to sign and has every right, even being in prison and given her crimes, to refuse to sign. Additionally, a court would likely NEVER take into account the relationship between the people sharing custody. There are countless estranged people who shared custody of children, the courts prioritize (or at least try to prioritize) the needs and wellbeing of the child, not the adults. Lastly, I doubt a drunk driver would receive the lesser charge of manslaughter over the charge of negligent homicide. Either way, in 99% of cases these charges would be felonies, meaning the minimum prison time is 7.5 years. It is unlikely that someone whose actions resulted in a death would be released early after only 5 years. She wouldn’t even be eligible for parole. Colleen, spend less time researching wack names for your characters and more time researching an accurate depiction of the legal process.
If I ever prayed for anything, it'd be for Alizee.
Also Kenna would have been a lot more sympathetic if Scotty had been driving and they had just blaned her for him drinking or going to the party
That scene where she buys a glass of wine but doesn't drink it reminds me so much of that guy in "the fault in our stars" who always had a cigarette with him but would never light it because it was a "metaphor"
If i was Scotty, I'd be fuming from those letters
He couldn't flag down a car in 6 hours?
SHE NAMED THE KID SCOTTY
Oh and the wanting to just smell the wine and turn away thing is taken from that James Fry (not sure if I spelled that right) book, A Million Little Pieces or something, that turned out not to be a true story. Apparently the book ends with him getting out of rehab, then ordering a drink, so you think he'll relapse, but then he sniffs it and just leaves it. Supposed to show how strong he's become or some bullshit.
I wrote a story about a married movie star who falls in love with the new nanny. I set it up like a reverse Fatal Attraction. He actually kidnaps her in the end.....yet people still complained that they didn't end up together. I blame Colleen and E L James for this! 😂
Title?
Oh, it's called The New Nanny and I wrote it on the Chapters App xx
A highschool girl was drunk driving with her friends in my home town. She split the car nearly all the way in half going over 70mph in a 35mph zone and running into a traffic light pole. She got a high bail set by one judge but got sentinced by a different judge who gave her only 5 years. She killed all 4 of her friends who were in the car with her. She only had a broken arm. There were protests after they annouced her sentencing but nothing was done. The life of each teen only being worth a little over a year. The sentence she recieved is such a dishonor to the victims and their families. CoHo just brushed by all the damage her character did by drunk driving and she never even apologizes or is respectful to the families in any way. Its so disrespectful