Review: Never Never (Never Never, #1) by Colleen Hoover and Tarryn Fisher

Never Never by Colleen Hoover

My rating: 1 of 5 stars
Received: Bought
Publication Date: January 7th 2015
Publisher: Indie
Point of View: 1st Person & Alternative
Genres & Themes: Young Adult, Contemporary, Romance, High School, Secrets, Drama

BLURB:

Best friends since they could walk. In love since the age of fourteen.
Complete strangers since this morning.
He’ll do anything to remember. She’ll do anything to forget.

REVIEW:

Surprise, surprise, this is my first time giving a Colleen Hoover book one star as a rating. Actually, I have never never (HA!) rated one of her works less than three stars. Her novels are usually enjoyable, but I very much disliked this one…and am not going to feel sorry about it. There are some books on Goodreads that you can feel uncomfortable writing a negative review for because of how many of your friends loved it or people in general, but I’m not going to let this one be one of them. Never Never, you sucked missed the mark. So badly.

First off, this is not New Adult; it’s Young Adult. The characters are in a freaking high school! And there is freaking high school boy drama! Secondly, this is not a story; it’s a BIG and FRUSTRATING teaser. If we had an entire novel, what I just read would have been the first two chapters of it. (Because I’m taking out the useless ones only meaning to confuse us more.) In fact, it is as if the authors told themselves ‘‘The more we confuse our readers and add unexplained information, the MORE they’re going to freak and LOVE IT!’’ Nuh-uh. Yes for the former: I am indeed freaking out at how much I disliked this but never in a million years would I come to love this short story (ugh, it even hurts to call it that.)

Alright, so you’re probably wondering about the characters now. Are they nice? Beautiful? Well-developped?
‘‘I think my mother may be a bitch.’’ Yeah, that was Charlie, the main character, you just heard. She thinks her mom is a bitch because this latter wants to protect her against Silas whom took her husband away from her – I assume – and hurt Charlie. But are we given real detail on that? Well of course not, that would have been giving the readers too soon what they want. Why not let them linger a little while longer…until May 2015 perhaps? I hope this is at least a duology. Let’s not even start on Silas. The author pictured him as a guy hopelessly in love with Charlie (even before really knowing her) with so much intensity that I wasn’t convinced anymore. It was TOO MUCH. And TOO SOON.

There is cheating.
There are plenty of unanswered questions.
There is a cliffhanger.

There is an insta-love vibe and a high paranormal one too. It’s a very unrealistic contemporary story with a hard to imagine and unbelievable romance and a deal of under-developed secondary characters. And the writing wasn’t even that good! Simplistic and sometimes in contradiction with the personality of the characters. Often in the book, Silas says how he doesn’t like what Charlie does with a voice that implies more ‘‘I dislike this chick.’’ than ‘‘I’m deeply in love with this beautiful girl.’’

Also, this:

I’m standing on the edge of the lawn, looking down his street when he walks up behind me. I don’t hear him approach, but I smell him. I don’t know how, since he smells like the outdoors.

This is ridiculous. Are you sure you didn’t sense him, instead? *shakes head*

I did not like this and would not even recommend it to my worst enemy. I know many of you liked it though and I respect that. I’m debating whether reading the sequel or not, because who would be okay with having so many unanswered questions on their minds? But I will not prioritize it even a tiny little bit.

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