Opinion | What's the Story With Colleen Hoover's Romance Novels? - The New York Times - 0 views
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shared by Javier E on 07 Jul 23
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for the past few years, these books have been written by Colleen Hoover.
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What is it about Hoover’s stories — which dwell largely in romance, but also include a thriller and a ghost story — that women are drawn to?
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I slorped down three of them in one week. I found myself carrying them from room to room, slipping in what would begin as “just a few pages” but then stretch into hours’ worth.
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Though Hoover’s settings bop around America from Boston to New York to Texas to Vermont, the only contextual references pertain to pop culture, social media and the occasional local attraction.
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Politics are confined to the daunting gulf between haves and have-nots, and even when Hoover’s striving heroines find themselves among the haves, their hearts remain forever with the have-nots.
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In these novels what matters more than anything else is hardship: Hardship is everywhere, women must suffer, women can heal, and those who make it through all this have the capacity to find themselves/love/happiness. The reader can’t help feeling that the heroine/Hoover is speaking to me/for me/like me.
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Fiction of this sort reflects a strain in the culture that has shifted from a fascination with the other — the rich, the powerful, the exclusive — to a more inward preoccupation with the self and the desire to see oneself reflected in the stories one consumes
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Women’s popular fiction of the ’80s, when the glitter and glamour of “Dallas” and “Dynasty” dominated prime-time TV, offers a sharp contrast. In best sellers of that period, the settings jetted from Monte Carlo to Capri to Rodeo Drive, populated by the rich, famous and destined-to-be. Heroines could have been peeled off the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine
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As with TikTok testimonials of adolescent mental health challenges and group-chat confessions, it’s about “relatability” and the willingness to reveal all. Even celebrities must bare all
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I never shed a tear while reading Sheldon, but that wasn’t the point. The point was exuberant voyeurism, the literary equivalent of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” The heroines’ lives were nothing like mine nor were they meant to be. That’s what made them so absurdly entertaining.
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Colleen Hoover paints on a more intimate canvas. Her stories aren’t about attaining worldly power on a grand scale, but about finding power within
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Hoover offers readers an emotional road map to recovery from imposter syndrome, domestic abuse, betrayal, victimization. It’s a very different kind of achievement.
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In a country where economic inequalities can seem insurmountable and systems of power ever more remote, this may be the best her hard-knock heroines — and readers — can hope for.
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For readers invested in characters who are like themselves — if perhaps more beautiful and with more exciting sex lives — the emotional payoff can still feel hard-earned. And, just possibly, the story could happen to them.