Never Never: The Complete Series by Colleen Hoover
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Charlize Wynwood and Silas Nash have been best friends since they could walk. They’ve been in love since the age of fourteen. But as of this morning…they are complete strangers. Their first kiss, their first fight, the moment they fell in love…every memory has vanished. Charlize and Silas must work together to uncover the truth about what happened to them and why. But the more they learn about the couple they used to be…the more they question why they were ever together to begin with.
Colleen Hoover books have been a hit or miss for me. But Never Never was up there with some of her best work. I like the fact that she experiments with these different genres within Romance. She always seems to be able to find one secret ingredient that elevates her book and sets it apart from the rest. In this case, the ingredient was the premise itself. (Taryn Fisher is a new author to me and I don’t really know how much of this was from her.)
Never Never series is split into three books but the whole series can be read as one novel. I liked the first book the best. In stories involving unexplained occurrences, the best parts for me are when the story remains unexplained. The magic and the mystery hook me and I am almost always let down by the explanation, the mundanity and practicality of it just pulls you out of that mystery. It’s no one’s fault. It is the way it is.
In a way, the authors of Never Never side stepped that landmine by simply leaving things unexplained. By the end of the book there are too many threads that you can pull on and undo the whole thing. For example, the subplot involving the tarot reading showed some promise but it was left hanging because maybe the authors realised that expanding on that part of the story would double the length of the book. The main characters have to stay focused on themselves to solve the mystery, they have to stay focused on the present. So should you.
Never Never is the story of Silas and Charlie and how they find their way back to love after waking up one day with no memory of each other. The contrast in their characters showed in Silas’ confident and passionate internal monologue verses that of Charlie, which was aloof and authoritative, kept me engaged. By the end, Silas was an open book and Charlie remained a mystery. It was a nice little mystery/romance that helped me get out of a reading funk I’ve been having.
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