Regretting You

“Betrayals, secrets, and shifting family loyalties keep the pages turning in this excellent contemporary from Hoover… This is Hoover at her very best.”

— Publishers Weekly

⭐⭐⭐⭐

1. REGRETTING YOU by Colleen Hoover

SYNOPSIS

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.

BOOK REVIEW

“Attraction isn’t something that only happens once, with one person. It’s part of what drives humans. Our attraction to each other, to art, to food, to entertainment. Attraction is fun. So when you decide to commit to someone, you aren’t saying, ‘I promise I’ll never be attracted to anyone else.’ You’re saying, ‘I promise to commit to you, despite my potential future attraction to other people.’” I look at Clara. “Relationships are hard for that very reason. Your body and your heart don’t stop finding the beauty and the attraction in other people simply because you’ve made a commitment to one person. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you’re drawn to someone else, it’s up to you to remove yourself from that situation before it becomes too hard to fight.”

I usually try my best to keep all of my book reviews free of any potential spoiler, and it is no different with this one. And I would strongly suggest you reading Regretting You with no prior knowledge of what the story entails at all since this is the only way you get to fully experience all the heart-wrenching and morbid even moments for what they truly were.

I will say that grief poisons the book air and gets under the skin leaving dark patches along the way. And I could clearly see the differences in how both Morgan and Clara dealt with it, undergoing two completely different story arcs and developments. Their voices were so surprisingly sound and refreshingly distinctive but the way they weaved together was simply flawless. As a mother, Morgan had every intention to protect her daughter who she sacrificed so much for but never regretting doing so, and it was just painful witnessing Clara’s reluctance and sometimes even unwillingness to at least try and understand her mother… But I must also point out that as a mother, Morgan should have known better than refusing to be completely honest with Clara. Truth can be painful but secrets are proved to be fatal…

Anyway, the book was great. I never expect anything less from Colleen Hoover. She always writes more than a simple ‘boy meets girl’ book. Her writing style is unique and twisting in the best way possible. Don’t waste any more of your precious time and go grab your copy of Regretting You!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Colleen Hoover is the #1 New York Times and International best-selling author of multiple novels and novellas. She lives in Texas with her husband and their three boys. She is the founder of The Bookworm Box, a non-profit book subscription service and bookstore in Sulphur Springs, Texas.

Your novels often tackle serious issues, such as It Ends With Us. Regretting You deals with grief, betrayal, and an intensely fraught relationship between a mother and her teenage daughter. What was the most challenging aspect of this book to write?
The most challenging aspect for me was the tension between the mother and daughter. I had an unusually great relationship with my mother as a teenager, so I couldn’t personally relate to what Clara and her mother were going through.
Regretting You is told from two points of view, that of Morgan Grant and her daughter Clara, 16. Was it hard switching between two such distinct voices? Did you write one first and then the other or switch between the two?
With the exception of Ugly Love, I’ve always written my books in order by chapter. With Regretting You, I alternated point of views, so there was a lot of going back and forth between the minds of the two characters. I always find it challenging to be inside any character’s head. I find it a challenge not to transfer my own thoughts onto each character, so there were times I found myself wanting to scold Clara or shake some sense into Morgan. But I feel like this book was especially challenging because the characters are a lot alike, being mother and daughter, so I had to show similarities while also highlighting their age differences and how their maturity levels differed in response to what was happening to them.
How much of your own experience, either as a mother or as a teenager, did you draw on for this book?
I mostly drew from my mother’s experience with my sister. They butted heads more than my mother and I did, so I drew inspiration from imagining them in these characters’ shoes.
- Colleen Hoover