My rating: 1 of 5 stars
“You’ll never be able to find yourself if you’re lost in someone else.”
----Colleen Hoover
Colleen Hoover, the #1 New York Times bestselling author, has penned a cheesy and corny new adult love story, November 9 which has a very similar story line just like David Nicholls' One Day where the two young protagonists are thoroughly fractured from the inside yet are on a way to pursue their dreams, but they meet each other right on the crossroads and decide to keep up their instant attraction for one another alive until the next year on the very same day, although there's more drama to it, that one can ever imagine.
Synopsis:
Beloved #1 New York Times bestselling author Colleen Hoover returns with an unforgettable love story between a writer and his unexpected muse.
Fallon meets Ben, an aspiring novelist, the day before her scheduled cross-country move. Their untimely attraction leads them to spend Fallon’s last day in L.A. together, and her eventful life becomes the creative inspiration Ben has always sought for his novel. Over time and amidst the various relationships and tribulations of their own separate lives, they continue to meet on the same date every year. Until one day Fallon becomes unsure if Ben has been telling her the truth or fabricating a perfect reality for the sake of the ultimate plot twist.
Fallon, the eighteen year old former teen starlet meets Ben, the wannabe writer, at a cafe while she was meeting her dad for the final time before she moves to New York to audition for Broadway roles from her home city LA. Ben rescues the falling conversation between Fallon and her father, by acting up as her fake boyfriend, and instantly they pretty much fall for one another. Unfortunately Fallon is moving away and they both decide to meet each other every year on the same day and spend the time together, and maybe five years down the line, they will plan to get into a serious relationship. But midway through their arrangement, Fallon learns an ugly truth about Ben an d her painful past, and that threatens to break this pair up. Can they fight it and stay strong?
This is the last time that I read any Colleen Hoover book as the quality of her story has degraded and does not live up to expectations like her previous novels, which are challenging and something to hold on to apart from a brilliant writing style.
Then what went wrong with this particular book?
In my pint of view, everything went haywire in this particular novel, from the writing style to the plot line to the character development to the prose to the climax to the backstory.
Firstly Hoover's books aren't cheesy at all, I mean, that is the only reason why I ever read her books. I never found her previous novels to be corny, like this one, which is thoroughly cliched till the very last page. The story is foreseeable right from the very start and not to mention, this story is sort of run of the similar lines of David Nicholls' One Day. The story fails to engage me as the emotional depth is very ambiguous. The only thing that kept me glued to the story was the hope that somewhere I'll find this story to be promising, yes I DNF the book, only when it gives me a headache, but since November 9 didn't turn out to be excruciatingly painful enough, I kept on reading until the very end.
The writing style is very much unclear where the emotional depth is missing as a result readers might not be able to feel connected with the story line. The narrative is equally messed up and unreminiscent, also the dialogues are way too cheesy and fails to reflect any emotions through them. Hence the readers might not be able to feel for the characters' plight. The prose is equally pathetic and sub standard quality, felt like reading a cheap Indian fiction. The twists are very easily predictable and any child could figure out the major plot twist, I expected a better story from Hoover.
The characters are, oh god, it's better not to talk about them, who are equally painful, melodramatic, underdeveloped, perfect even with their scars (physical ones), falls for corny dialogues when uttered by one another. Fallon is a little whiny girl who loves to whine about her face, scars, fire, men, acting, father, and after meeting Ben, she started whining about Ben too. Even though she is 18 years old, her maturity level is that of a 12 year old girl. The one thing, I disliked the most that I expected the author would gradually develop the fractured relationship between a father and a daughter, instead she kept the limelight on Ben and Fallon's fluctuating relationship graph. Ben felt like a mindless character with a terrible funny bone, whose jokes are..it's better not to talk about his sad jokes that he kept delivering at wrong moments, and highly unrealistic, the kind of boyfriend that does not exist in real lives, I mean I rarely ever came across a guy who is so sentimental to the very core in this 21st century.
In a nutshell, for me, this was a waste of time, money and energy and not to mention about the author's brilliant idea of portraying a story through a novel written by Ben, which is nowhere mentioned that whether it is fiction or memoir, so then again, the characters are highly unreliable with their equally dull and pathetic dialogues.
Verdict: Hitting my head on the wall!
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Author Info:
Colleen Hoover is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of eleven novels and five novellas. Hoover's novels fall into the New Adult and Young Adult categories. Hoover published her first novel, Slammed, in January 2012.
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