By Michelle Lee (24A01A)
Raffles Reads is a collaboration between Raffles Press and Times Reads which aims to promote a reading culture among Singaporean students.
Rating: ⅗. An experience similar to watching an entire series on Instagram Reels.The other day, I stumbled across an Instagram page posting Reels of low budget, 20-minute video series (so each episode was about one minute long). Each distinct series had titles barely distinguishable from the others, all involving a billionaire husband.
Somehow, I ended up watching all episodes of a particular series, and I found the experience strikingly similar to my experience reading this book. I didn’t know why I was watching it, but I couldn’t stop.
Colleen Hoover is one of the biggest and most polarising authors in contemporary romance. And the book I’ll be reviewing, Too Late, is (in her own words) her most “morbid and vulgar” work yet.
The book was originally released on Wattpad chapter by chapter in 2016, before being officially published in June 2023. Having seen all sorts of content about her on social media yet never having touched a Colleen Hoover book, I jumped at the chance when I was kindly sponsored a copy by Times Reads, our collaborator.
Online, Hoover enjoys a dedicated following, as well as a sizable faction of critics. Since the rise of Booktok during the pandemic, she has been one of the most talked-about writers on the Internet.
Her writing has drawn a myriad of reactions, ranging from positive ones towards her emotional novels to video-essay style dissections of her “juvenile” writing and controversial presentation of issues such as domestic abuse, with heated debates from both sides. All of this made me very, very, excited to see what the hype was all about.
01: Plot, Characters, Genre
Right off the bat, we are introduced to Sloan, our main character, and her boyfriend, Asa. It is quickly revealed to us that their relationship is the opposite of healthy and while Sloan claims to love Asa, her internal monologue reveals that she “ha[s] no other choice”. This is because she depends on Asa to finance her special needs brother’s medical facilities.
Asa is obsessive, and takes advantage of and endangers Sloan, without even providing a good place for her to live. All Sloan does is reassure herself, telling herself she’ll leave him when she graduates college.
“He brought me in when I had nowhere else to go. No one else to turn to. For that reason alone, I put up with him.”
The only time she experiences any sort of normalcy is in her Spanish class, where she meets Carter, an undercover agent on a mission to bust the biggest drug dealer in college history—who is, you guessed it, Asa.
Carter and Sloan quite literally fall in love at first sight, but Carter begins ‘working’ with Asa, making Sloan question his morals. At the same time, more and more of Asa’s insane behaviour is revealed, and Sloan and Carter must navigate their shaky romance while trying to escape Asa’s grip.
02: What I like/dislike about the book
In terms of personal taste, I was rather frustrated by how Carter’s job as an undercover DEA agent felt like nothing more than a convenient tool to enhance the thrill factor of the novel through his double identity.
Throughout the book, he never really seems to be doing his job, and there is never any mention of a task or mission that he must fulfil for the sake of the operation. He constantly brings up how his feelings for Sloan could jeopardise the operation, yet never elaborates on how or what exactly he’s doing for the operation to begin with. It all just feels like a convenient way to set up an interesting premise for the story to take place.
I was looking forward to some kind of parallel plot where he has this romance with Sloan while taking down Asa’s drug syndicate but it was never realised because he never does take down the drug ring—which I suppose should be expected given that he never seems to be doing any work to make this happen.
In fact, the drug ring just stops being mentioned after a while. It feels like CoHo did want to pursue this double plot at the beginning but after a while she simply decided to shift focus to Asa’s insane behaviour and how Carter and Sloan are forced to react to it.
03: Was it well written?
There were numerous plot twists that I really did not foresee, though I don’t know if I should call them clever or just rather unrealistic. Nevertheless, they definitely kept me on my toes, and I never really knew what to expect when I turned the page. I admit that I found myself flipping to the end numerous times just for some assurance that a character would still be alive at the end of the chapter.
What I found more lacking were the characters: while Asa and to some extent Sloan were relatively fleshed out with the help of childhood flashbacks and interactions with family members, Carter never quite showed any discernible personality apart from caring about Sloan, a lot.
He is by far the least developed out of the 3 characters, and the book ends with the reader knowing barely anything about him. Most noticeably, none of the characters showed any real growth, and were relatively static from the beginning to the end of the 400-page book.
I do see how this would have been really engaging as a chapter-by-chapter web novel, because of how unpredictable and twist-heavy each chapter is. It really is the sort of book that has you on the edge of your seat, at once afraid to turn the page and unable to turn it fast enough.
However, when read as a whole novel rather than chapter by chapter, the discrepancies become much clearer. The plot twists don’t feel like they’ve been planned; the best part of any thriller book—the moment of realisation when you suddenly see all the hints that have been leading you to this conclusion since the very beginning—is missing. Rather, each twist feels more like an afterthought, and the previous chapters could have been written exactly the same way, but with a different ending.
Still, I did think how the entire story was told in the perspectives of each of the main characters (Sloan, Asa and Carter) was effective. Especially given Carter’s undercover status and Asa’s unpredictable character, the split perspectives allowed the reader to be informed of what the other characters weren’t—adding to the effects of foreboding and panic. Often, it meant that we knew what the characters did not, and could only pray for them to act before it was too late.
04: Who I would recommend this book to
I would recommend this book to people who want something exciting that would engross and distract them from their day-to-day life. For all my criticisms of CoHo’s writing, I can testify that this book was nothing if not entertaining; sort of like a guilty pleasure.
I finished this book in just over 2 days, and found it creeping into my mind even when I wasn’t reading it. Sometimes, what you need from a book isn’t beautiful exposition or deep characters; a book can be a whole lot of fun without either of those things.
Content warnings: foul language, sexual scenes, murder, violence, sexual assault, and drug use. This book has no official age rating, but is targeted towards mature audiences.
