For once, Auburn takes a risk and puts her heart in control, only to discover Owen is keeping major secrets from coming out. The magnitude of his past threatens to destroy everything important to Auburn, and the only way to get her life back on track is to cut Owen out of it.
The last thing Owen wants is to lose Auburn, but he can’t seem to convince her that truth is sometimes as subjective as art. All he would have to do to save their relationship is confess. But in this case, the confession could be much more destructive than the actual sin…
Ok, I’m going to be totally honest here, since I had been slacking in writing my reviews I figured “hey, why not just do videos on the bunch of books i read but didn’t review so i can go by faster and improve my English?”
Turns out I can’t stand hearing myself stuttering and going back and forth in an endless cycle of “this book is about” “emmm…” “emmmmm…………” so screw it, I missed writing and using gifs which is why I’m back with this review. Sure, my writing is still pretty crappy too, but it’s the kind of crappy that I’m used to!
And speaking of crappy, I’m going to talk about Confess by Colleen Hoover (bet you didn’t see that comin’)
To be fair, I always consider that this author has a way to set her novels apart from other romance books, and I respect that. In the vast majority of books out there the plot is pretty simple: boy meets girl, they fall in love *insert mindless drama that makes no sense* LOVE CAN CONQUER ALL!!!!! <3<3<3<3 THE END
But with Hoover here, she makes sure that her characters have at least some history, they don’t just pop out of nowhere and start gazing into each other’s eyes and fall in love, no. They come from a somewhat complicated history, start gazing into each other’s eyes and fall in love *insert mindless drama that makes no sense* LOVE CAN CONQUER ALL!!!!! <3<3<3<3 THE END
So it kind of adds a bit more to the story but we are still left with the usual familiar tropes such as insta-love, “good, inexperienced” girl meets bad boy who has been into everyone’s pants but it’s somehow enchanted with this bland female character that has no personality nor self-respect. Add a “slutty” friend to show just how good and pure the MC is, a love triangle (if it’s with a friend, even better) and drama ensues.
Confess is told in two separate POVs, one is Auburn, our main character who lost the love of her life when she was only fifteen years old. Now at the age of twenty she’s in desperate need of money to hire a lawyer; what for we do not know, but that leads her to a studio where she meets Owen, a talented young artist and our other MC who is looking for an assistant for that very same day.
We don’t know why or how, but it’s apparent that Owen knows Auburn and a little bit about her past. The thing is, he can’t say that since “confessing” that little secret coulddestroy everything.
The writing style was perfect, not magnificent but I had no problems getting into the story. Or at least I wouldn't have, had it not been for the dumbass characters. Sigh.
The main problem was… well, this is mainly a love story, right? Our focus will be on these two people, how they meet, connect and fall in love. We have to be invested in the characters and relationships for the story to work and that just didn’t happen with me.
I had problems connecting with passive Auburn, who may I say only had sex once when she was fifteen (I really dislike the trope of virgin heroines). She had no character and no depth despite everything she had gone through. More often than not I ended up pissed off at her rather than at the situation she was in. She had a chance to make things work, to take matters into her own hands and do, for once what was better for her and yet she kept on doing nothing, somehow waiting for somebody to come and rescue her. Her passivity baffled me, and it pissed me off how it was used to move the story forward and create cheap drama. “I could do this thing and fix my problem!... Or I could just do nothing at all and make matters worse so that this problem can resurface in thirty pages or so.”
She’s the classic virgin heroine, so we are subjected to lines like this one:
What the hell am I doing? I don't do this kind of thing. I don't invite guys into my home. Texas is turning me into a whore
She has one girl friend, if you can call her that. Auburn doesn’t connect with her much because her roommate has “too much confidence in herself”. But she was the best part of this book, I wished it had been about her.
Now, if there is something that I hate, hate, hate, hate in books is rape used as a plot device. It’s more freaking common than we would like, the “handsome nice guy who saves the girl from being raped to show just how nice he is.” Or the, in a love triangle, when we have a “nice guy” not so nice and a “bad guy” not so bad, rape is usually used to show that the nice guy was not that nice to begin with and so the girl will go running back to the bad guy and beg him his love! Because after such a traumatic experience she’d only care if the other hot guy still likes her? Fuck that.
I hate it, and in this book rape is used as a freaking plot device that not only helps to improve the chances of the love interest, it also sends a very wrong message: If a guy likes you, you own him so you should let him take what he wants from you for him not to be mad at you.
I’m not fucking making this up, this is something that happens here and that was Auburn’s way of thinking, that if the guy raped her then maybe he wouldn’t be so mad at her for liking someone else and forgive her. MOTHERFUCKING FORGIVE HER. In the end, this issue was never addressed again, she forgave the guy and he walked away free, not even acknowledged as a rapist.
Owen, well he wasn’t so passive but he wasn’t much better either. He was what I imagine August Waters would be at twenty-one and, although I’m sure it would appeal to many, I fricken disliked that kid. Owen is a famous artist with his own studio at this very early age, an accomplishment impressive indeed. He was also a fricken annoying snob who looked down on every woman he ever dated.
It wasn’t very nice being inside his head and hear how he went on and on about how his ex-girlfriends were just too dumb to even talk to so they spent most of their time “not talking”. Dude, why the hell did you date them if you couldn’t stand them? So you could fill page after page of your obnoxious ranting on how all the sexy girls that threw themselves at your feet weren’t good enough for you?
He annoyed me to no end, how he told Auburn that he was the only one that deserved to love her and told her how to live her life. He sounded more like an obsessive stalker rather than a fun love interest.
"And I need you to remember that anyone can make love. But I’m the only one who deserves to make love to you."
"He presses his palm against my heart. “And no one else deserves to be inside you if they can’t get there through here first.”"
Creepy as shit.
The relationship:
Then there is the matter of how these two people worked together, it’s romance after all! Right?
The romance between Owen and Auburn was the major plot of this book and it failed to hook me because there was no chemistry between them.
What did these two see in each other? Dunno, I missed that spark. We get from Owen’s point of view that he has somehow met Auburn before, but she doesn’t remember him, so I could see why he would be a bit interested about her, but certainly not why he was suddenly so fricken in love with her after talking for a few hours.
Owen, the douche who every woman is never good enough for him, is suddenly madly in love with a girl with a courageous heart who “gets him”.
Same goes for Auburn, despite all of her reservations and all the heartbreak she has gone through, she suddenly finds herself drawn to this guy she just met, so much so that when he doesn’t call her it makes her go into a small breakdown. If we consider all the time the two of them actually spent together it sums up to less than five days, FIVE DAYS and it’s an amazing all-consuming love that blah, blah blah.
One of my biggest issue with “Confess” that I saw it first happening in Never Never, is that the characters don’t communicate. Owen and Auburn each have a secret, and that is used to cause drama in the sense of “I can’t believe he did that.” Or “Why would she lie to me?” and yadda yadda which is particularly annoying since they are supposed to have this amazing love because the two of them understand each other like no one else does… and yet they don’t talk? How can they understand each other so well if, when it comes to the time of actually trusting the other person, they just won’t risk it? And the dumbest thing was, the secrets weren’t even that much of a big freaking deal! And one of them is never even revealed so, what the hell was the point of the whole “confess” novel?
I definitely liked how the author gave each of the characters a story besides the love part, but the whole book just fell flat to me.
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