Review: All Your Perfects by Colleen Hoover

All Your Perfects starts off with a strong premise. Quinn and Graham are a couple who meet, in the hallway of the apartment that belongs to Quinn's fiancé. It's not quite love at first sight, but the attraction is strong. And that's all rather complicated, because Quinn's fiancé Ethan is inside his apartment, enjoying a well, romantic moment with Sasha, who is Graham's girlfriend. Quinn and Graham plan to bust the cheaters big time. The shared moment eventually leads them to falling in love, and then ...

What would have made an excellent premise for a short story or a novella is stretched out into a domestic melodrama that runs across two parallel timelines. Timeline one shows how Quinn and Graham met, fell in love and the blissful, happy relationship that came out of what could have been the worst night of their lives. Timeline two tells the story of how their marriage falls apart, and the challenges the pair face--although they desperately want children, this hasn't happened for them. Quinn is suffering depression and then Graham goes and does precisely what a man in his situation shouldn't. Don't worry, this all gets resolves very quickly and rather unrealistically toward the end of the novel.

As I stated, the story of how Quinn and Graham met would have made for an excellent premise for a lighthearted short story or novella and probably would have worked better as such. This one feels like a sincere attempt at turning a light, trashy romance into something deeper, but it just doesn't work.

If you've never read any of Colleen Hoover's novels before, this isn't the best place to start--I'd recommend her early work, like Slammed, or her first adult novel It Ends With Us, which has seen a surprising resurgence in recent times, thanks to some influential reviews on TikTok.  

Recommended only to diehard fans of CoHo, who probably read this back in 2018 anyway.

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