Ugly Love is a fairly infamous romance novel by Colleen Hoover.
The book is told from two perspectives–Tate and Miles. Tate is current day, and Miles is six years ago.
We begin with Tate, who is temporarily moving into her brother Corbin’s apartment and she arrives while he’s away for work. As she’s heading up to his apartment, she encounters an incredibly inebriated Miles, who her brother tells to let into the apartment for the night as he’s one of his good friends. He’s so beyond drunk he mistakes her for another woman named Rachel and begins to uncontrollably sob and profusely apologize to her for what he did. What he did to her remains a mystery.
Miles joins Tate and her family for Thanksgiving dinner and this is where their relationship begins.
He injures his hand and Tate begins to stitch it up. Apparently, medical care is very hot to Miles since he begins to silently feel Tate up by slowly running his hand up her leg, thigh, back and neck. He then tightens his grip around her neck and forces her to kiss him. I guess it’s a good thing she also just so happens to be attracted to him because otherwise, hey dude, what the fuck are you doing?
They agree to start a no-strings-attached relationship and Miles gives Tate two rules to follow: “Don’t ask about my past. And never expect a future.” Very mysterious and cool and definitely doesn’t sound like something an edgy teenager might say.
Tate overtime somehow manages to fall for Miles despite his personality being absent and him smiling at her being unexpected enough to make a poem about.
Miles smiles.
That rhymes.(…)
Miles smiles
For no one else
Miles only smiles
For me.
Absolutely love a male love interest that is so emotionally unavailable to the point of a smile being worth noting. Never seen this before and it’s definitely not a tired trope. Dear romance authors, you can give your male love interest a personality and emotions.
Eventually, Corbin finds out about her relationship with Miles. Do you think he:
A. reacts like a normal human being and moves on with his day
or
B. acts like he is the owner of Tate’s sex life and is possessive to the point where he threatens to hurt Miles
It’s B. Of course it’s B.
Corbin pierces me with a stare as firm as his stance. “You’re not a brother, Tate,” he says. “Don’t you dare tell me I’m not allowed to be pissed.” He steps back into his bedroom and slams his door.
What does this even mean? What does being a brother have to do with anything? I despise the “overprotective” trope with all of my being. There’s nothing more repulsive and incest-adjacent than a woman’s relative acting like they own her sexuality. It’s not protective. It’s weird. Let’s stop pretending it’s anything different.
The way Miles’ perspective is told is baffling. He’s 18 in his perspective chapters, but you would think you were reading the thoughts of a toddler by the structure of his thoughts.
Rachel is happy.
I make Rachel happy.
I make Rachel’s life better.
Her life is better with me in it.
I guess Miles read “See Spot run” and thought that was the pinnacle of sentence structure. And, no, this is not a cherry-picked line. I dreaded getting to his chapters because they were all written in this bizarre way. About 99% of his perspective is centered on the page and each sentence is its own paragraph.
Rachel, Rachel, Rachel.
She’s like poetry.
Like prose and love letters and lyrics, cascading down
the
center
of
a
page.
Clearly, the goal was to try to emulate a poetic way of writing and give an innocent feeling to his infatuation. But this is not even somewhat close to poetry and the innocence is infantile. There are no poetic descriptions of their love and relationship or how beautiful she is to him. It’s just:
Wow, Rachel is cool.
I like Rachel.
Rachel likes me.
This is nice.
It’s every thought splattered into the center of a page and it’s painful to read. This style of writing would work for me had Miles been 6 when he met Rachel for the first time, not 18.
So, what’s the point of Miles’ perspective other than to test your patience?
We’re supposed to be slowly unraveling the mystery of his and Rachel’s relationship. He was supposedly in love with this girl. Obsessed would maybe be a more apt word. Their relationship–much like the relationship between him and Tate–isn’t elaborated upon beyond a physical connection. I don’t know why these two actually even like each other. All they do is kiss and talk about how much they like the other. Ok, I guess.
This book is infamous for a few lines as Rachel and Miles are coming home from the hospital with their newborn son:
I laugh. “You’re responsible for the beautiful part, Rachel. The only thing he got from me was his balls.”
She laughs. She laughs hard. “Oh, my God, I know,” she says.
“They’re so big.”
We both laugh at our son’s big balls.
If you were to ask someone what they know about this book, it would likely be “We both laugh at our son’s big balls.” That’s all I knew about it going in. But immediately after this scene, they get into a horrible accident where they’re run off a bridge and their son drowns after Miles makes the last-second choice to save Rachel. Total and complete emotional whiplash and it makes it impossible to actually take the scene even remotely seriously.
It was definitely intended to be a juxtaposition of an extremely happy moment in their lives with a horribly tragic one and it fails miserably at that. The strange discussion of balls is such a confusing choice. You’re busy still trying to understand the weird conversation and then, bam, son’s dead and everyone’s traumatized. The emotional impact completely misses.
This chapter is also very telling about who Miles is and what about this moment actually mattered to him. His obnoxious, everything-is-centered-on-the-page stops, but only after he realizes Rachel hates him.
Rachel hates me.
I hold her anyway.
I don’t make Rachel’s life better anymore.(…)
RUINED.(…)
You can’t love me after this, Rachel.
The “poetry effect” doesn’t stop when his son dies in the accident. Miles’ concern is not over the loss of his son, but the fear that Rachel doesn’t love him anymore. What a great guy.
This is the reason we get Miles’ perspective at all: For a lame, tragic backstory that is supposed to justify why he can only have purely sexual relationships now.
Miles is apparently afraid to love again after the tragic death of his son. This is weird to me. His hang-up is being afraid of a committed relationship when the trauma he experienced was from a car crash where his child drowned. You would think this might manifest as a fear of having children or driving or of water. But, no, Rachel left him after this. And he’s obsessed with her. So it comes across as the reason Miles is actually upset is due to the fact the girl he was in love with left him, and he couldn’t give two shits about the dead kid. This is backed up by the fact he can eye-rollingly only have no-strings-attached sex.
This trauma dump chapter also comes right after Tate finally decides to stand up for herself and cut things off between the two of them. She decides she’s had enough of his shit and is ready to move on. This chapter is supposed to justify Miles treating Tate like a sex toy for the entire duration of the book.
It works on Tate. He comes to her crying, and she believes he’s finally going to open up to her. Nope, they have sex again for the thousandth time, except this time he calls her Rachel. Instead of standing up for herself and telling him to get the fuck out, she repeatedly tells him to “Just finish, Miles.” How romantic. I’m rooting for them.
After this, Miles goes to Rachel’s house (we don’t know how he has her address, they haven’t talked in years and she doesn’t live in the same house), where he sees that she’s fully moved on; she’s married and has a child. This is finally what makes Miles see that there’s never going to be a future for the two of them, and he can finally move on from his obsession with her.
So, he goes back to Tate to settle. Tate, being a doormat, welcomes him back with open arms, and they live happily ever after, I guess. I hate this book.
I don’t know why this book is called Ugly Love. Ugly implies there’s some severe conflict in the relationship. That a relationship is destructive in some way. That two people don’t get along. They argue, scream, fight. I think Boring Lust would be a more apt title for this story.
At the very least, it was a quick read since
it was
written
like this
half the time.
