Layla by Colleen Hoover

 

From a purely clinical, technical standpoint, this story is an easy four star review. But from an emotional standpoint, this was a one star experience and I am still pissed. As you may or may not know, this week, I'm doing a project called "Hype Week" where I am reading the books that are constantly parading around my feed on Goodreads and Instagram. And LAYLA has been batting its bookish eyelashes at me for a hot minute, and I've been like, "IDK, babe. I've been hearing some red flags about you." LAYLA is the fuckboy of books, and its "hero" is a supreme dirtbag skeaze.

***WARNING: SPOILERS***

So it's going to be impossible not to discuss this book and my thoughts in detail, and while I'm going to try not to spoil too much, there are a few twists I have to talk about so you know why I think this hero belongs in a clown college somewhere. Or maybe even jail.

First, imagine a story where a dude is a sleazy, wannabe musician. He dates women who make him feel good about himself. Like, his first girlfriend was a starfucker and saw him as the next Johnny Cash, or whatever, and he broke up with her because he thought her obsession with him was starting to get too needy and pathetic. Then he falls for a manic pixie dreamgirl who makes him literally feel like he's high all the time because she's such a hawt nympho. And then his jealous ex finds out about the new relationship and shoots MPD in the head. Suddenly the manic pixie is recovering from a head injury and not herself anymore. She's needy, too. Goddamn it, he didn't sign up for a relationship where he has to do any kind of legwork. But one day, post-brain trauma MPD gets possessed by a ghost and sleazy musician is like, "Wow, this ghost who's mind-raping my girlfriend right now is pretty hot." Suddenly, he's slipping sleeping pills into MPD's drinks to knock her out so he can get at that good ghost pussy, gaslighting MPD, and even telling the ghost "she looks prettier when you're inside her" because goddamn it, he's a man, and he just wants someone without problems.

And you don't want to know what he does to the MPD when she decides she wants nothing to do with this haunted house they're in, or the dude who seems to be keeping her there. But I'll give you a hint. It rhymes with jalse jimprisonment. In any other storyline, this dude would straight-up be the villain and would probably be killed off or sent to jail at the end of the book. But in this book, he's the "hero" and his psycho clown actions are justified to us, even though BY HIS OWN ADMISSION, he didn't actually realize he was doing a good thing. He was totally down to mind-rape just to feel an emotional connection to someone else, using his girlfriend's body as a dial-up server for supernatural phone sex. Whoop-dee-doo. An asshole is you.

The feminist in me was hoping that this was going to be a feminist deconstruction of the manic pixie dreamgirl trope, or that Leeds Gabriel (*snort*) was an intentionally unlikable character, kind of like the guy from Caroline Kepnes's YOU, and at the end of the book there was going to be some kind of comeuppance. Several reviewers mentioned a twist that CHANGED EVERYTHING and I was like, okay, bring it. And then the twist happened and I was like, "Ohh, so you're just gonna try to justify it to me and do me dirty like that CoHo?" After 300 pages of gaslighting, I was not ready to have the gaslight turned on me, the reader. Oh no. Fuck Leeds Gabriel and his stupid name. He sucks.

I don't want to spoil the ending but let's just say that if you accidentally do the right thing for the wrong reasons, you're not a good person. My envisioned ending would have been so much more satisfying for me but then it wouldn't have been a romance and this author's fans would have been mad. Books like these, to me, are just solid proof that people are willing to take just about any amount of shit from a male character as long as he has abs, but if a female character is even the slightest amount of grumpy, difficult, or bitchy, everyone starts hating on her in the reviews and saying how much she sucks.

C L O W N.

3 out of 5 stars