Reviews with content warning for Blood - Layla

Reviews tagging 'Blood'

Layla by Colleen Hoover

21 reviews

layla_reads's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? N/A
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

layla is too good for leeds. #ihateleeds

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erica_reads_things's review against another edition

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dark emotional hopeful mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

Pretty fun read! Took me a bit to get into it but once I did and the plot really started moving, it kept my interest. I guessed THE Plot Twist™ a bit before it was revealed but that didn't make it any less enjoyable for me, just made me want to hurry up and see if I was right lol.

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oravkinovasara's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

This book isn’t what I expected it to be. I hated Leeds so much at first, well not at first, after like 100 pages and I wanted to kick him in the ass and spit in his face. I was like what the hell is this?? It was really good though. I loved the plot twist, duh, it’s Colleen Hoover. This isn’t my favorite book of hers, but it is still very good, different, but good. Colleen’s mind is just so fantastic, I don’t know how she comes up with this stuff. Overall, I think it was amazing, the ending, the plot was good too, I liked the past to present chapters and Layla was amazing too, well all things considered…

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bella_01's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.75

Absolutely incredible book!! If you can, I'd totally recommend reading it. The plot was totally unpredictable and super interesting. The book immediately hooks you in by presenting the 'storyline' as a flashback to some extent, with every couple of chapters jumping back to the present. This book is completely different to anything else I've ever read, and not at all what I expected from reading the blurb.

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marisacarpico's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

Funny that Hoover is most known for straightforward romances and I’ve only read her weird genre experiments. That said, this is pretty strong. I kind of wish it didn’t sacrifice the more difficult route of using Leeds to explore misogyny and the fickleness of some men for the big romantic gesture, but I mostly found it really compelling.

I will say, Hoover really overwrites her characters’ emotional beats. So many sentiments felt repeated to death and his whole book could easily be 20-30 pages shorter and a lot more thrilling. The middle section, where this is just emotional manipulation and gaslighting is tough to read and not having to sit with it so long might make this more emotionally resonant overall. Hoover writes herself out of the corner she puts the characters into, but just barely. This concept might be easier to swallow as a film, honestly. We just have to suspend our disbelief and struggle to keep our sympathy with Leeds for too long in book form. I genuinely considered DNF’ing this for a minute.

The time jumping really felt affected for so much of the book and it ends at a key turn, but you can feel the construction in a way I didn’t like. Also, it’s too hard to believe a choice the characters make re: a visit from some guests in the last act. There’s a reason for it, but it’s just one step too far in asking us to believe theses characters aren’t dumb as fuck. Also, really stupid to ask us to believe Leeds is so curious about Willow yet never takes 5 minutes to see if anyone died in the house or to do some research into why the previous owners suddenly abandoned it. Hoover might be too big to get hard edits at this point, but her editor is asleep at the wheel if they’re just letting shit like that slip by.

Anyway, I seem really critical on this, but it’s got enough that works about it that I don’t think the flaws totally ruin the experience. It’s no Verity, but I do have to appreciate what Hoover was trying to do even if she doesn’t do it particularly well.

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larainsidebooks's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

By the end of this book, I was just laughing and shaking my head at this absurd plot. I see that Colleen Hoover tried to do something here and mixing a different genre into her usual romance, but it felt like she suddenly had an idea for a plot twist that seemed cool, but it lacked everything that it needed to make it a good plot twist. It was just messy, underdeveloped and hard to follow.

And here's also the fact that this plot twist somehow excused all of the bad things the MC did to his love interest, even though he didn't know the plot twist was going to happen. He even acknowledged that what he was doing was bad and another person agreed with him, but he still did it?! I find that really hard to wrap my head around.

I read a book with a similar aspect couple of years ago (2019) and while the ending was also kind of absurd, I feel like that plot twist had more weight and shocked me more than this one. That made me guess what was going to happen in this one too, but here it was just bad.

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emilys_editions's review

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dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

Layla was an interesting book. My first CoHo read and it was a bit of a romance/thriller... Maybe? It was easy to read but slow and while I think the concept was good, the execution wasn't that great.

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