Regretting You – Colleen Hoover

Genre: Contemporary, Romance
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Pages: 365
Release Date: December 10, 2019

From #1 New York Times bestselling author of It Ends with Uscomes a poignant novel about family, first love, grief, and betrayal that will touch the hearts of both mothers and daughters.

Morgan Grant and her sixteen-year-old daughter, Clara, would like nothing more than to be nothing alike.

Morgan is determined to prevent her daughter from making the same mistakes she did. By getting pregnant and married way too young, Morgan put her own dreams on hold. Clara doesn’t want to follow in her mother’s footsteps. Her predictable mother doesn’t have a spontaneous bone in her body.

With warring personalities and conflicting goals, Morgan and Clara find it increasingly difficult to coexist. The only person who can bring peace to the household is Chris—Morgan’s husband, Clara’s father, and the family anchor. But that peace is shattered when Chris is involved in a tragic and questionable accident. The heartbreaking and long-lasting consequences will reach far beyond just Morgan and Clara.

While struggling to rebuild everything that crashed around them, Morgan finds comfort in the last person she expects to, and Clara turns to the one boy she’s been forbidden to see. With each passing day, new secrets, resentment, and misunderstandings make mother and daughter fall further apart. So far apart, it might be impossible for them to ever fall back together.

 

Regretting You is Colleen Hoover’s latest novel where she tackles difficult emotions and an impossible situation.

Regretting You may be Hoover’s most difficult novel to read for more than one reason. The story tackles grief, love, and infidelity and the characters emotions and reactions. The story also addresses a situation where there is no one way to handle the elicited emotions, so processing my own thoughts and feelings and those of the characters makes Regretting You a heavy read.

Regretting You is told through two perspectives, the mother and daughter, Morgan and Clara. Morgan fell victim to teenage pregnancy and became an adult quickly. Clara is a typical teenager looking forward to college. Therefore, you have two characters who have had different adolescent lives making their personalities even more different than their age gap suggests.
Clara irritated me to no end. I had to put the book down in some instances to distance myself from her actions that I found to be immature and annoying. I think this is a testament to Hoover’s writing, understanding of emotion and character to elicit such strong feelings from readers. Clara is a teenager and she acts like one, even when it is detrimental to her likeability as a character.

Regretting You focuses heavily on Morgan and Clara’s relationship. The clichéd notion that mother daughter relationships during the teenage years are fraught with turmoil is on full display. Almost all the tension throughout the novel is caused by Morgan and Clara’s deliberate miscommunication.

The reason I rated the novel 4.5 stars is that as much as I enjoyed it, I did not love it as much as I have loved Hoover’s previous novels. Maybe the heavy subject matter made the novel difficult to read at times or maybe my expectations were in the wrong place, but whatever the reason I still thoroughly enjoyed Regretting You, especially the ending. Without going into spoilers, the ending of the novel was easily the best part. It is adorable and is quintessential Hoover.

***I received an ARC via Netgalley for an honest review.

 

Have you read Regretting You? What did you think?