Confess

Confess by Colleen Hoover
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Colleen Hoover is an author that, when you hear she's written a new book - you know it will be good. Confess is no exception.

This time the story is all about Auburn and Owen, two characters who are trapped in their own inability to face confrontation. Owen is an artist, so he paints away his troubles. Auburn is an unhappy hairstylist who needs a second job to finance some legal troubles. She happens by his studio one day when he needs someone to handle clients at his show later that evening. Things go from there.

The hook here is that Owen asks for "confessions" - he has a little mail slot on the door of his studio and he encourages people to anonymously write their secrets and drop them in. He then takes those secret confessions and uses them as inspiration for his paintings. Everybody in this story has something to confess, some secret they're keeping, and the plot is just the slow reveal of those secrets.

The characters here are classic Hoover - poignant and sympathetic without being sappy or cliche. They handle situations in a realistic way that showcases both their strengths and weaknesses. They make dumb decisions, they talk themselves into doing the wrong thing for the right reason. The story starts with heartbreak and then eventually circles back to it but with a more hopeful perspective. This plot device is one of those that seldom works, but we're talking Colleen Hoover here. She always makes it work in a way that is refreshing and clever.

The story is told well but the pacing was a little off for me. There were long stretches of time between events in the characters' lives that didn't have much going on; it seems that the romance could have been a little better developed here. Doing that would also have offset the "insta-connection" - it wasn't really instalove as much as it was a spark that fed the whole forbidden love idea. It was still believable.

On audio the book is narrated from two points of view by Elizabeth Louise and Sebastian York. These two narrators are prolific. But that's their downfall for me; all the characters from all the books sound alike. In this case I was prepared to be disappointed. They turned out to be average, which may have colored my view of the book somewhat. There are just better narrators out there and this story would have benefited from them. While this one isn't terrible on audio, it is probably better read in print overall.

This isn't my favourite of Colleen Hoover's books - but that doesn't mean it isn't fabulous. I'll read anything this woman writes. I'm always waiting for her next story.

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