Regretting You book review

Regretting You by Colleen Hoover
Published by Montlake Romance on December 10, 2019
Pages: 363
Goodreads

From #1 New York Times bestselling author of It Ends with Us comes 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.

I have been a big fan of other Colleen Hoover’s works, they are always the perfect guilty pleasure read and I love the characters. Regretting You was different, I think there was such a disconnect to the characters and the scenario they were faced in. There was such a lot of info-dumping throughout this story that there wasn’t enough time to work out who was who and why they were feeling the way, I also think the fact that a lot of this storyline was based on emotion the romance actually took away from that. I wish I loved this one but everything was predictable and I wasn’t a fan of the way everything ended up working out, it was just a little too neat.

The characters in Regretting You are Morgan, Clara, Jonah and Miller as they deal with the issues surrounding grief and change. I think my biggest issue with the story and the plot is definitely the disconnect I felt when they were talking about their life. Everything seemed to be moving a lot quicker than I thought it should and to make up for this there was a lot of inner monologue and dialogue. I struggled with reading this one, usually I fly through Hoover’s work but I just didn’t care about the characters and why they were feeling the way they were. I think for a storyline like this to work there needs to be a definite connection with the characters to really empathise with what they are going through.

In regards to the best bits of Regretting You, I definitely think it would have to be Miller and his reaction to everything. He was definitely the most normal out of all of them and I really appreciated his insight into the world around him. His relationship with Gramps was the most heartwarming thing and I loved the way they interacted and the use of film and photography throughout their relationship.

I’ve mentioned the fact that the characters were completely disconnected from the story but for me, the worst part of this story was just how predictable it was. From the beginning, I knew exactly how it was going to end up and how it was going to come together, I was just disappointed there wasn’t any other twist or turn throughout this one, something to make the story something better than what it was. That was what I was expecting from Hoover’s writing and Regretting You just didn’t have the spice or the urgency that I wanted it to have. The whole experience was just a little lack lustre.

I wouldn’t recommend Regretting You, I think there are other books that are a better read and I wouldn’t want this to be the first book that someone experienced of Hoover’s writing because in my opinion it didn’t work for me.

Have you read this one? What did you think? Let me know!