Colleen Hover, American author, has published over 20 books that became a positive outlet for people during the pandemic in 2020. She graduated from Texas A&M-Commerce with a degree in social work; she then moved on to working numerous social work and teaching jobs before deciding to start her career as an author.
“I became addicted to slam poetry videos and watched them for days,” Hoover said.
At a certain point, she was “in the mood” to read and slam poetry was on her brain, so she attempted to find an interesting slam poetry book. When she couldn’t find one, she took it upon herself to simply write one.
In 2012, and at the age of 32, Hoover published her first novel called “Slammed”, the story of a teenager grieving her father’s death. She then published the sequel, “Point Of Know Retreat”, and her career began to immensely thrive. Her more popular books came out at a staggered pace throughout the following decade. “Ugly Love” came out in 2014, “It Ends With Us” was published in 2016, “Verity” hit the shelves in 2018, and “Reminders of Him” was finalized in 2022.
In 2022, she sold more books than John Grisham, James Patterson, and Dr. Seuss combined. She holds six of the top 10 spaces on The New York Times’ paperback fiction best-seller list. To say Hoover has completely dominated the literature industry since 2020 is an immense understatement. The popular teen app, TikTok, aided her tremendously in her fame. With people of all kinds, all over the world rating her books on a scale of 1 to 10, giving recommendations to new readers, posting videos relating to famous quotes from her stories, or showing off their collection of her work.
Despite Hoover’s constant retrieval of optimism and love, she has been faced with a good amount of backlash from her audience recently. Readers have begun speaking out about the way Hoover writes about romance.
Jeanette McKellar of The Tulane Hullabaloo claims that, “In Hoover’s work, women are illustrated as passive objects, only able to derive agency when their male counterpart chooses them. Her stories feature romanticization of toxic masculinity, unhealthy codependent relationships and abusive, controlling behavior.”
Whitney Atkinson, YouTuber, tweeted a controversial photo of a quote from one of Hoover’s books. The quote consisted of a male character considering using physical force to prevent his female love interest from exiting a car. Not only that, but Hoover wrote in the paragraphs following about emotional manipulation.
Critics find this so problematic because of the fear that young readers will mentally invest in these books, and subconsciously believe that these topics are normal and present in romantic relationships. Her work is still popular, but her statistics have gone down since the start of the controversy.