Review: November 9 by Colleen Hoover

November 9, Colleen Hoover's latest New Adult romance is about Ben, an aspiring writer, and Fallon, a former teen actor who is trying in earnest to resurrect her career after she was badly injured in an accident. The pair meet one day, on November 9, the day before Fallon moves from LA to New York and end up spending a romantic day together. Over the next five years their lives each take many separate twists and turns, though they continue to always meet on November 9 every year. And then one day, Fallon discovers that Ben has been keeping a terrible secret from her which changes their relationship forever ...

By now, readers should not what to expect--and what not to expect--from a Colleen Hoover novel, and she gives just enough to satisfy readers. There is plenty of heat--though just enough to titillate rather than shock readers, tragic pasts and misunderstandings, and of course, readers get to see both sides of the story through the lives of Fallon and Ben. It's a nice romance, perhaps not so different from her other books, and as always, her characters show an appreciation for the arts and Ben's book makes up an important part of the story. A little irritating was the way that the author inserted a number of lazy contemporary idioms into the narrative, such as the feels and insta-love however, some readers may get a giggle out of this. There is also a bit of commentary on the place of a book boyfriend and the differences between romance books and the kind of romance that might be desirable in real life. Which, I suppose, helps to make the unlikely romance between Fallon and Ben a bit more understandable--I do not think there would be many many who would rescue Fallon the way Ben does at the start of the story and I sincerely doubt whether many women would be as forgiving as Fallon is at the end of the story. 

Recommended to fans of contemporary romance. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean...
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu...
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A...
Read more