Colleen Hoover Gave Me a Soundtrack and a Moral Headache

The setup: a boy, a bass line, and a really bad night

Here’s the premise, and it’s a doozy. Sydney finds out her boyfriend is cheating on her with her best friend, on her birthday, which is a lot. She ends up crashing with Ridge, the guy across the courtyard whose music she’s been quietly humming lyrics to for months without ever meeting him. Ridge writes melodies. Sydney writes words. They start making songs together, sitting close, sharing headphones, being far too tender for two people who are absolutely not supposed to be doing this.

Because Ridge has a girlfriend. Maggie. And Maggie is not a villain. That’s the thing that makes this book work and also the thing that makes it a little unbearable in the best way. Hoover doesn’t hand you an easy out. There’s no secret betrayal, no “she was awful all along.” Maggie is lovely and loyal and dealing with real stuff, and the whole time you’re rooting for Sydney and Ridge you also feel like garbage about it.

Oh, and Ridge is deaf. Which sounds like the kind of detail that could go badly, could turn into a gimmick or a cheap dose of inspiration bait. It mostly doesn’t. It’s woven into how they communicate, how the music happens, how the texting-heavy chapters land. I’ll be honest, some of it feels a touch romanticized. But it shapes the whole rhythm of the story instead of decorating it.

What actually got me, and what made me put the book down for a second

The slow burn is the real product here. This book understands that wanting is hotter than having, and it drags out the wanting until you want to scream. There’s a scene where they set a rule, a literal boundary about what they will and won’t let themselves do, and then the entire rest of the book is them white-knuckling that line. Hoover is very good at the almost. The hand that doesn’t quite. The song lyric that says the thing neither of them will say out loud.

And I have to give it up for the music. The real songs, written and recorded by Griffin Peterson for the book, are woven in so you can actually listen at the moment each one appears in the story. When you get to the big collaborative song near the end, the payoff of all that pent-up feeling channeled into an actual audible track, I genuinely felt it in my chest. It’s a commercial move, it’s a marketing hook, and it is also just good. I hate being manipulated this efficiently.

Now the part where I stop gushing.

The near-cheating engine that powers this whole thing is also its biggest liability, and I don’t think the book fully earns its way out. For a lot of the runtime, Ridge is emotionally two-timing a woman who trusts him, and the story asks you to find that romantic. Some days I did. Some days I sat there thinking, my guy, just break up first, this is not that complicated. Hoover leans on the idea that feelings this big can’t be helped, and I’m not always sold. Sometimes “we couldn’t help it” is just a nicer way of saying “we chose not to stop.”

Here’s the thing though, and this is where I question my own taste: I like messy. I like a morally gray situation that makes me squirm. If I’m going to defend dark and unapologetic romance in general, I don’t get to suddenly clutch my pearls the second a book actually commits to the discomfort. So is my problem that the book is doing something wrong, or that it’s doing exactly what it set out to do and I wanted it to let me off the hook? Genuinely not sure. That tension is kind of the point.

Small tangent: I read a lot of Hoover in a short stretch a couple years back, one of those spirals where you finish one and immediately start the next, and this is the one I actually still think about. Not the twistier ones people scream about. This quiet, guilty, headphones-in one. Make of that what you will.

The prose is functional, not gorgeous. Hoover writes clean and fast and emotionally direct, which is a huge part of why she sells the way she does. Nobody’s reading her for the sentences. They’re reading her because she finds the softest part of your chest and presses on it. Fair trade, honestly.

A love story where nobody is the bad guy is somehow harder to survive than one where somebody is.

About Colleen Hoover

Colleen Hoover is the Texas author who basically got adopted by BookTok and turned into a phenomenon, years after some of these books first came out. She started self-publishing in the early 2010s, wrote a pile of contemporary romance and new adult, and then a whole new generation found her and sent her sky-high all over again. She’s the poster child for the argument about whether massively popular equals good, and she seems totally at peace not caring. She writes emotional, high-concept, comfortable-but-devastating stories, and she is very, very good at knowing exactly which button she’s pushing. Love her or roll your eyes at her, she out-earned entire publishing imprints by understanding what readers actually want to feel.

If this one got under your skin, read these next

• It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover, for her heaviest and most-argued-about swing, if you want to see her take on much darker territory.
• Ugly Love by Colleen Hoover, another music-and-heartbreak slow burn with a killer emotional reveal.
• The Deal by Elle Kennedy, if you want the same new-adult swoon with less moral vertigo and more banter.
• Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire, for messy, all-consuming, questionable-choices new adult in the same era and mood.

You can grab Maybe Someday on Amazon if you want to listen along with the actual songs, which, do that, it’s the whole point.

For your book club

1. Ridge and Sydney set a boundary and then spend the book testing it. Did that rule make their behavior more forgivable to you, or just more deliberate?
2. Maggie is written as genuinely kind. Would the story hit differently if she’d been given a flaw that let you off the hook?
3. The book asks you to root for an emotional betrayal. Where’s your personal line between falling for someone and cheating?
4. Did the music enhance the story for you, or did it feel like a marketing device dressed up as art? Can it be both?
5. Ridge’s deafness shapes how the couple connects. Did it feel authentic and integral, or occasionally romanticized?