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A review by justinkhchen
Layla by Colleen Hoover
3.0
3.5 stars
A distant cousin to Sarah Pinborough's Behind Her Eyes, but better. The dominant sense of isolation is key to why the paranormal element works so much better in Layla comparing to Sarah Pinborough's city-based nonsense; by removing the happening from society and limiting the number of character, the story smartly avoids the pitfall of needing to over-explain and justify its fragile supernatural logic. In fact, my favorite moments in Layla are ones left extremely vague and ambiguous, such as the origin and identity of a key secondary character.
For me, the first 40% is the strongest section, where Colleen Hoover laid out crucial details regarding the couple (which did become relevant later), and spent time building up the ominous atmosphere. I particularly appreciated some of the more bizarre, almost Twin Peaks level WTF moments in this early portion, which unfortunately diminished almost to nil once the romance took center stage. Speaking of romance, while Layla did venture down some risky territories (specifically Leeds' questionable behavior), and successfully write itself out of it, The repetitiveness of its setup ultimately made a good portion of it feeling unnecessarily long-winded.
Overall, Layla started strong, lost some steam in the middle, and wrapped up only semi-decently (just shy of going overboard with its very convenient, made-up paranormal bogus), but it is also sprinkled throughout with some really intriguing elements, and surprisingly ballsy narrative decisions. Definitely worth checking out if the paranormal + romance combo pique your interest.
A distant cousin to Sarah Pinborough's Behind Her Eyes, but better. The dominant sense of isolation is key to why the paranormal element works so much better in Layla comparing to Sarah Pinborough's city-based nonsense; by removing the happening from society and limiting the number of character, the story smartly avoids the pitfall of needing to over-explain and justify its fragile supernatural logic. In fact, my favorite moments in Layla are ones left extremely vague and ambiguous, such as the origin and identity of a key secondary character.
For me, the first 40% is the strongest section, where Colleen Hoover laid out crucial details regarding the couple (which did become relevant later), and spent time building up the ominous atmosphere. I particularly appreciated some of the more bizarre, almost Twin Peaks level WTF moments in this early portion, which unfortunately diminished almost to nil once the romance took center stage. Speaking of romance, while Layla did venture down some risky territories (specifically Leeds' questionable behavior), and successfully write itself out of it, The repetitiveness of its setup ultimately made a good portion of it feeling unnecessarily long-winded.
Overall, Layla started strong, lost some steam in the middle, and wrapped up only semi-decently (just shy of going overboard with its very convenient, made-up paranormal bogus), but it is also sprinkled throughout with some really intriguing elements, and surprisingly ballsy narrative decisions. Definitely worth checking out if the paranormal + romance combo pique your interest.