BOOK REVIEW: Ugly Love by Colleen Hoover

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Pages: 324

Genre: Contemporary Romance

This book. Wow! It made me feel ✨EVERYTHING✨. It was such an emotional roller coaster. 🎢

"Love isn't always pretty. Sometimes you spend all your time hoping it'll eventually be something different. Something better. Then, before you know it, you're back to square one, and you lost your heart somewhere along the way."

One moment I'd be giggling at the main characters with hearts in my eyes and the next moment I'd want to knock some sense into them both or I'd be crying to the point where I can't even read through the tears anymore.😭 Colleen is amazing at writing characters with SO MUCH chemistry and tension between them and OH the spice🔥

I'm a 50 pages a day kinda girl, but I could.not.put.this.down! I flew through the last 150 pages in less than a day. I was hooked from the start.

"It's easy to confuse feelings and emotions for something they aren't, especially when eye contact is involved."

Ugly Love follows Tate, a 23 year old registered nurse who moves to San Francisco to live with her older brother, Corbin who is a pilot. On the day she moves in, she meets Miles, Corbin's neighbour across the hall who is also a pilot. Miles is drunk and passed out against Corbin's door, causing Tate to not be able to enter her brother's apartment. They start off on the wrong foot, but are extremely attracted to each other. Miles doesn't want a relationship or love, while Tate is too focused with work and studying to think of a relationship, so the two start a no strings attached arrangement. Miles gives two rules for this arrangement:

"Don't ask about my past. And never expect a future."

I loved that the book altered between Miles' point of view from 6 years earlier and Tate's present day point of view, as it allows the reader to learn about what happened in Miles' past that makes him keep a wall up around him and his heart.

"Ugly love becomes you. Consumes you. Makes you hate it all. Makes you realize that all the beautiful parts aren't even worth it. Without the beautiful, you'll never risk feeling this. You'll never risk feeling the ugly. So you give it up. You give it all up. You never want love again, no matter what kind it is, because no type of love will ever be worth living through the ugly again."

Enemies to lovers is one of my favourite tropes, so I LOVED this book. There was just so much chemistry between these characters - the tension was almost tangible.

"A kiss is so much easier than what we're doing. When you kiss, you can kiss away the pain, the doubt, the shame. When you close your eyes and kiss, you protect yourself from the vulnerability. This isn't protecting ourselves."

There was also not a single character I disliked, besides Dillon. The relationships between all the characters were amazing too. I adored the strong sibling relationship between Corbin and Tate and how protective he was of her. I loved Corbin even more after reading the Epilogue. Cap was such a sweet heart as well and I truly loved his character.

"If a man lived through the ugliest side of love, he might never want to experience it again."

The friendship between Corbin, Miles and Ian was heartwarming too - especially between Miles and Ian. Ian was truly an amazing friend for Miles and really wanted him to find happiness.

"I know the thought of confronting your past terrifies you. It terrifies every man. But sometimes we don't do it for ourselves. We do it for the people we love more than ourselves."

There were quite a few moments between Tate and Miles where I felt so frustrated by both of them, but especially by him for the way he treated her.

“I’m terrified to lose him for good, so I sell myself short and take what I can from him, even though I know I deserve better.”

This book truly highlights the importance of working through your past before trying to get involved romantically with someone new, as you might inflict your old pain on them and allow your old pain to hold you back.

"Every time I'm with him, he fills my heart up more and more, and the more it's filled with pieces of him, the more painful it'll be when he rips it out of my chest as though it never belonged there in the first place."

Overall, this was such a heartbreaking and beautiful story which takes you through every single emotion you could ever imagine and it truly is a story that stays with you forever. I highly recommend this to anyone who likes these type of story lines.

Below are a few more quotes that really caught my attention:

"I'm so screwed up. Everything he says should send me running, but instead, it makes me want to wrap my arms around him and give him whatever it is he's willing to take from me.

♥

"This grown man, this wall of intimidation, this solid veil of armor, he's completely crumbling right in front of my eyes."

♥

"I never knew a heart could hold the weight of the entire world."

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"You deserve so much more than what you're allowing yourself to have."

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"I've missed you every single day we weren't together since the moment I met you."

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“God gives us the ugliness so we don't take the beautiful things in life for granted.​”

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“If I were capable of loving someone . . . it would be you.”