Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

What I dislike most about this novel is that with all the amazing authors and stories out there, this drivel is considered a New York Times best seller and the book is getting so much promotion. This is the third time I have taken a TikTok recommendation for a best seller, and all three times the books were just nonsense and not worthy of the money and praise they are getting. There may be some spoilers ahead, so continue with caution. This book is so cliche, the characters are undeveloped, and I felt embarrassed having to read it. I finished it so that I could write an honest review, but it was torture trying to finish this book. I even took a break from it to read another book, and having come back to it from another book, I realized just how terribly written it is! The main character is your typical, "she is so pretty she doesn't know it." Two men fall madly in love with her, and she is great at everything she does, including playing poker and bonding with strange men. Everything just somehow works out perfectly for all three characters to their looks, careers, and successes. The "Naked Truths" were cute in the first couple of chapters, but if you and your partner can only be honest with each other after saying, "Naked Truths?" then that is a red flag for a toxic relationship. There is no character development, except if you count that the whole first part of the book, the character is one way, and then on page 303 suddenly becomes this strong willed character who is finally making sense and contradicts what she said earlier in the novel. Hoover and another reviewer said that it was hard to read about Ryle's temper because they loved his personality in the beginning; what personality?! He is not ambitious; he is pompous. There's not much to him except the typical white handsome rich guy who begs for sex. There were lame excuses throughout the novel to explain things away, such as Ryle makes a trusting father because some abusive men are only abusive toward their spouses, or Lily got pregnant because she skipped a couple of her birth control pills. I know that is possible, but why even throw that in there? Oddly enough, I enjoyed the ending. I thought that it had a good theme, but I prefer books where the theme is intertwined throughout the novel and isn't just dumped on the reader in the last couple of pages. The epilogue, however, ruined the only saving grace of this novel and made sure to end up like a badly written Hallmark movie. Somehow everything gets tied up in a nice little bow for everyone including Ryle. In the Author's note, Hoover explains that she is writing from experience. It just goes to show that you can have a good story to tell and not the ability to actually write. Not only is this not a good story or book, but the author just can't write. She writes about as well as some of my struggling 8th graders. I had already knew that this book was about abuse, so I went into it thinking it was going to tackle a mature subject matter, but this book is neither mature or even dark. The author says that she wrote it so that people can understand why a woman would stay with an abuser, but this book did not do that for me. I will admit that I am a person who does not understand how a woman gets involved with an abuser or chooses to stay, and rather than coming away from this book with more understanding of that situation, I came away with the thought that the author took a serious subject matter and profited off it without doing any serious work. This is not a cheesy romance novel, this is worse. As one reviewer said, if you take your books seriously, skip this crap. I can only think that the reason this book is getting so much praise is because of a good publisher and teenagers and middle aged women who either never had good sex or have a misunderstanding of love and sex. The dialogue is cringy and the book is predictable. Hoover, you just can't write or tell a story.