All Your Perfects by Colleen Hoover

 DNF @ p.103

Have you ever read a book with a character so unlikable that even though the story was kind of interesting and the writing was okay, you were just like, okay, I'm done? That's me with Quinn and this book. The writing was clean and pretty well done and the story was sort of interesting, but I just wasn't invested in the FMC at all.

Colleen Hoover isn't an author I'm particularly into, even though I like her thrillers. I'm not a hater-- God knows she has plenty of those, though-- but she has a lot of themes that I don't really like, like the way she portrays gender norms, and how her characters form relationships. Some people find them romantic but I usually walk out of her books thinking that her leading men are pushy douchebags. The only reason I've been reading so much Hoover lately is because someone dumped a ton of her books in the library of the ship I'm currently on (and one of them was VERITY, which I actually loved, and brought back to my mom to tell her to read).

The premise of ALL YOUR PERFECTS is pretty interesting. Quinn and Graham meet when they find out that their SOs are cheating on them with each other. After waiting outside Quinn's soon-to-be-ex-fiance's door, and confronting the other couple, they eventually end up dating (but not before stringing along their rebounds-- including a great scene where Quinn says about her date to Graham, "Give me fifteen minutes, I'll get rid of him", not realizing that her date is actually standing behind her watching this). What a bitch LOL. Not that Graham is much better. At least he's more upfront about it with his date, though, although what he says still gets him slapped.

Apart from the fact that they're kind of insensitive themselves, despite being wronged, I didn't really think that the past romance between them was too bad. Hoover touches upon the weirdness of their meeting, and how they're both a little hesitant to start something because the way they met was kind of emotionally traumatic. It's the present chapters I didn't like. Quinn is being cold to her now-husband Graham and pushing him away because she wants a baby and apparently she's infertile. Present Quinn is bitter and angry at everyone. She's quit social media because seeing parents talking about their kids makes her angry. She gets resentful and angry about her sister when she gets pregnant by accident and is resentful and angry when she finds out that her sister told her mom the news before her because she wanted advice on how to tell Quinn in a way that wouldn't upset her (which she's also resentful and angry about). I get that some people really, really want children and not being able to have them hurts, but seeing someone make this the whole foundation of their lives, to the point where they say that the sole purpose of existence is reproduction and not being able to do so makes you broken link in the evolutionary circle of life (which she really does say, to an extent), just felt so gross.

I'm willingly child-free so I get that a lot of this is just something that I will never feel emotionally, and I can't imagine the pain of wanting to have children and not being able to. I'm sure there is a real sense of heartbreak and failure. I empathize with those people. But Quinn is a fictional character (i.e. not real) and in this book, in this particular story, hearing her go on and on about how she hates everyone and herself, to the point of destroying her relationships, just made me angry and annoyed. I didn't like Quinn in the past that much but I hated Quinn in the present. I don't think I'm going to finish this book, even if she redeems herself later. Life's too short to read books that annoy you and tbh, I'm tired of only reading books with happy endings that hinge on giving birth to a child, so if that's the HEA of this book, ew.

2 to 2.5 out of 5 stars