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Get Ugly Love on Amazon →Colleen Hoover's no-strings romance — a pilot's past, a nurse's present, and an arrangement that's supposed to be simple. Emotionally devastating when it works; messy when it doesn't.
• You're already a Colleen Hoover fan who hasn't read this one
• High-emotion contemporary romance with a dark backstory is your genre
• You want a quick, devastating read in a single sitting
• It Ends with Us worked for you
• You prefer romance where the hero's behaviour is consistently defensible
• Literary prose and character complexity are priorities
• You find the BookTok CoHo hype cycle off-putting
Hoover is an instinctive emotional engineer. She knows exactly which buttons to push and when to push them, and if you're willing to let yourself be manipulated — as romance readers generally are — Ugly Love is extremely effective. The Miles backstory is genuinely devastating, and the dual timeline structure (Miles's past in second person, past tense; Tate's present in third person) creates a dramatic irony that makes the novel's revelations land harder than they would in a linear structure.
The core relationship has real heat. Whatever you think of the terms of the arrangement, the chemistry between Tate and Miles is convincing, and Hoover earns the emotional payoff of the final chapters.
The criticism that Colleen Hoover romanticises poor behaviour is most pointed with this novel. Miles treats Tate badly, and the narrative frame sometimes lets him off too easily. Readers who find the emotional impact cathartic will disagree; readers who analyse the power dynamics of the relationship will not.
The prose in the Miles chapters — all lowercase, fragmented — is an acquired taste. It's meant to signal his dissociation from the past; whether it works stylistically is a genuine disagreement between readers.
Better than it should be given its construction, and more flawed than its fans acknowledge. Ugly Love is Hoover doing exactly what Hoover does, at close to maximum effectiveness. If CoHo's emotional register works for you, this is one of her better books. If it doesn't, this won't change your mind.
Score: 7.8/10. Recommended for existing Hoover fans. Conditional for newcomers.