Part of this is every mother-daughter relationship ever, part is an over-dramatised trope.
Genre: Y/A, Contemporary, Romance
No. of pages: 354
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.
This is a difficult one for me to review. I enjoy Colleen Hoover’s work so much; she always manages to pull out all the feels and notch up a great amount of angst.
‘Regretting You’ was a little off kilter for me. The pacing is slower, even though the alternate perspectives between mother and daughter Morgan and Clara switch with each chapter respectively and move the plot forward; there was a lot of misunderstanding, blustering off without getting the full picture, having a spat…. it felt all very over-dramatised. Plus – and this is my personal preference – I did not entirely like any of the characters.
Clara was doting one moment and irrational the next. Morgan was a people pleaser who drifted through life and felt washed-out as a character for me. The love interests were all-too-doting and secretly in love with the protagonists and felt like Hoover was painting the men with the same brush. Miller felt clingy and something about his characterisation made me feel very uncomfortable – like he was over-compensating for something. Johan is probably the one character I liked the most, but still, I wanted more dimension from him. Like I said, it’s just my personal impression of the cast.
The characters develop nicely, are complex and have different motivations. I think there was an element of emotional connection I wasn’t getting. Maybe I’m turning into a cold-hearted shrew? Maybe I’m tired of romance? Maybe I’m just dead inside? Only joking. Some books connect really well with certain readers, and ‘Regretting You’ didn’t do that for me. I still love Colleen Hoover’s writing and will continue to indulge in her books.
There are some nice reveals and a well written plot, I think it was somewhat simple, and the whole misunderstanding/misjudging trope in contemporary romance can be great if executed well, but it is so overused that may had added to some fatigue in my reading of ‘Regretting You.’
Overall a fun read, but one I did not enjoy fully. I’m on the fence recommending this one – probably for those who loved contemporaries and big fans of Colleen Hoover.
Overall feeling: just okay for me
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Casey Carlisle 