Regretting You

What's inside (7 sections)

1. Morgan and Clara before
2. The crash and what follows
3. The secret Hoover keeps until midbook
4. Miller and Clara, Jonah and Morgan
5. What the ending settles and what it leaves open
6. Key takeaways
7. FAQ

I picked up Regretting You because a friend said it was the Hoover book that made her call her mom. I expected a romance. What I got was more of a mother daughter story with two romances tucked inside it. Colleen Hoover published it with Montlake Romance in 2019, a 387 page novel that moves between Morgan Grant and her sixteen year old daughter Clara. It starts with a car crash and then spends the rest of the book asking who people were before they died and who is allowed to be angry after.

Morgan got pregnant at seventeen. She married Chris, stayed home, raised Clara, and put aside any clear plan for herself. Clara has grown up watching that choice from the other side. She loves her mother but she does not want her life. She wants acting, friends, Miller Adams, the boy with a truck and a reputation her parents do not trust. The early chapters set this friction well. Morgan is controlled and tired. Clara is fast talking and certain she is right. Hoover writes both voices in first person, alternating chapters, and you can tell them apart without the labels after a while.

Chris dies in a crash with Jenny, who is Clara's aunt by marriage and Morgan's best friend since school. Jonah, Jenny's husband, survives in the sense that he is alive. He is wrecked. Clara loses her father and her aunt in one night. Miller was close to the scene in ways that come out slowly. The town knows. School knows. Grief in this book is public and messy. People bring food and also opinions.

What I liked about the opening is that Hoover does not rush past the funeral details. Morgan has to plan things while numb. Clara has to go back to school where everyone stares. Jonah has to parent a small boy alone. Miller keeps showing up for Clara even when she pushes him away. There is a scene where Clara cannot sleep in her own room and ends up on the couch with old movies. It felt true. Grief makes you pick strange comforts.

Morgan and Clara before

To understand the rest, you need the backstory Hoover fills in through memory. Morgan and Jenny met young. Chris and Jonah were friends. The four adults formed a tight group. Morgan got pregnant, married Chris, and stayed in that circle. Jenny married Jonah later. They all stayed in the same town. From the outside it looked stable.

Morgan remembers being seventeen and scared, choosing Chris because he was kind and steady. She does not paint herself as a victim. She says she loved him, but she also wonders what she gave up. She never went to college. She never worked much outside the home. When friends ask what she does, she says she raises Clara. That answer starts to feel thin to her even before the crash.

Clara remembers a different version. She remembers her dad as fun, her mom as strict. She remembers Jenny as the cool aunt who listened. She does not remember her mother as a person with a past. Teenagers rarely do. Hoover captures that gap without making Clara cruel. Clara is just sixteen. She thinks her mother disapproves of everything, including Miller, partly because Morgan does disapprove of Miller at first.

Miller Adams is introduced as the boy Clara has liked for a while. He makes films, drives too fast, has a difficult home life. Morgan and Chris told Clara to stay away. After the crash, Miller is one of the few people who does not treat Clara like glass. He argues with her. He shows up. He also carries his own link to that night, which Hoover reveals in pieces. I found their scenes the most alive in the book, full of interrupted talk and half finished plans.

The crash and what follows

The crash happens early, so this is not a spoiler so much as the premise. Chris and Jenny are in a car together when it happens. That fact alone starts talk. Why were they together? Morgan tries to shut that down. Jonah goes quiet. Clara notices the quiet and fills it with worst case stories.

Hoover is good at the logistics of sudden death. Who calls whom. What happens to the kids. How Jonah and Morgan have to talk about insurance and houses while barely able to stand. There is a moment where Morgan has to go through Chris's phone. Anyone who has lost someone will recognize the dread there. You want answers and you fear them at the same time.

Clara returns to school and finds that grief isolates you even when people mean well. Friends do not know what to say. Teachers give her extra time she does not want. She throws herself at Miller harder, partly from love and partly because he feels normal. Morgan watches this and worries. She grounds Clara, takes her phone, sets rules that made sense before and feel absurd now. Their fights escalate. One fight in the kitchen, about a party and a lie, left me siding with both of them at once, which I think was the point.

Jonah becomes a central figure rather than a background widower. He has a young son to raise. He works with his hands. He and Morgan have known each other for years but never leaned on each other this way. Their scenes are careful. No rushed romance. Just two exhausted people sitting on porches, handling paperwork, remembering. I appreciated that Hoover let them be awkward. They say the wrong thing. They apologize.

The secret Hoover keeps until midbook

About halfway through, Hoover reveals the question that changes the family story. I will keep it vague enough here but this is a summary, so you should know the shape. There is a doubt about Clara's paternity. Morgan learns something Chris may have kept from her. A test was taken or discussed. The possibility that Jonah could be Clara's biological father hangs over everything.

Hoover handles this better than I expected. It is not played as a twist for shock. It is played as a slow crack. Morgan replays memories of Chris, trying to read them differently. Was he distant that month? Did that joke mean something? Jonah pulls back because he is afraid of what wanting Clara to be his would say about him. Clara senses the shift without knowing the cause, which makes her act out more.

The scenes around the possible test are painful. Morgan has to decide whether to know. Jonah has to decide whether he can love Clara the same if the answer is no. Clara, still in the dark, feels everyone keeping something from her and assumes it is about Miller. In a way she is right that they are keeping something, just wrong about what.

I should say Hoover writes the adult confusion well. Morgan is not a saint. She resents Chris for dying and leaving her with questions. She resents Jenny for being the friend she cannot ask. She feels guilty for resenting dead people. That loop felt honest. Grief often includes anger you are ashamed of.

Clara's side is less patient but just as honest. She starts sneaking out. She lies about where she is. She and Miller make a short film for school that becomes a place to put feelings they cannot say out loud. Miller's home life gets more page time here. His father is harsh. His mother is absent in the ways that count. Making things is how he stays steady. Clara starts to understand him beyond the crush, which is one of the book's nicer arcs.

Miller and Clara, Jonah and Morgan

The book really has two love stories running side by side. Clara and Miller are first love, intense and clumsy. They break up and get back together. They hurt each other with words they cannot take back. One scene at a drive in, where Miller tries to show Clara a rough cut and she is too upset to watch, stuck with me. He wants to be seen. She cannot see past her own house on fire. That is sixteen in a sentence.

Hoover does not romanticize them too much. Miller pushes at boundaries. Clara sometimes uses him to punish her mother. Friends warn them. Adults interfere in unhelpful ways. But there is care there too. Miller remembers small things Clara says. Clara defends Miller when it costs her. When they finally talk straight about the night of the crash and what Miller saw, it lands because Hoover waited.

Morgan and Jonah are slower, older, more afraid. They have kids, mortgages, memories of their spouses in every room. Dating feels disloyal. Not dating feels lonely. Hoover lets them take small steps. Cooking for each other's kids. Fixing a fence. Sitting through a school play. There is a dance of practical help that turns into company that turns into something neither wants to name.

What makes this pairing work is that both are parents first. Jonah's son is young enough to ask direct questions adults avoid. Morgan has to answer Clara's questions while asking her own. They compare notes on how to keep going. I liked that their affection grows out of shared labor rather than grand speeches. When they do finally admit feelings, it feels earned and also frightening to them.

A fair criticism is that Jonah is almost too good. He is patient, handy, devoted, says little but means it. Real people are more uneven. Hoover gives him flashes of temper and withdrawal, but he remains the steadiest person in a book full of storms. Some readers will love that. Others may find Morgan's choice too easy once the facts are clear. I leaned toward loving it, but I noticed the smoothness.

Another criticism is pacing in the middle. The alternating chapters sometimes repeat the same event from two angles with little new information. A fight is shown, then shown again. I started skimming a few of Morgan's ruminations around the two thirds mark. The book is 387 pages and could have lost twenty without losing feeling. Hoover's fans may not mind. I wanted a bit more air.

What the ending settles and what it leaves open

Hoover resolves the paternity question. I will not state the result here in a way that ruins it, but I will say the answer matters less than what each character does with it. Morgan has to decide whether she can forgive Chris for uncertainty. Jonah has to decide what fatherhood means if biology says one thing and years say another. Clara has to decide whether knowing changes who she is.

The final third moves quickly. Clara makes a choice about Miller that shows growth rather than surrender. Morgan makes a choice about work and school that she should have made years earlier. Jonah makes a choice about staying or pulling away. There is a public scene at Clara's school that ties the film project, the grief, and the relationships together. It is a bit neat, but emotionally satisfying.

The last chapters focus on Morgan and Clara talking at last without performing mother and daughter roles. They name regrets. Morgan admits she was scared to want more than marriage and motherhood. Clara admits she confused strictness with lack of love. They do not fix everything. Hoover leaves some friction, which I respected. Families do not get clean endings. They get better conversations.

The romance endings are hopeful rather than sealed. No one runs through an airport. People make dinner plans and keep them. That fits the book. After a crash, ordinary continuity feels like a promise.

If you have lost a parent or a partner young, parts of this will hit hard. Hoover writes the weird practical loneliness well, the way you miss someone most while doing taxes or driving past a restaurant. She also writes teenage love without condescension. Clara's feelings for Miller are treated as real, not practice.

Who will not like it? Readers who want fast mystery or high heat may find it slow. The book is more about talking and remembering than action. A few plot turns rely on people not asking obvious questions sooner. And if you dislike alternating first person or diary style entries, the structure may grate.

I finished it late at night and sat with it a while. It is not Hoover's most polished book. The middle sags and Jonah is idealized. But the central question stays with me. How do you love people who are gone when you learn they were more complicated than you knew? Hoover's answer is that you keep loving them, but you stop asking them to be simple. You let your mother be a person. You let your daughter be separate. You tell the truth sooner next time.

That phone call to my friend the next morning was short. I said she was right about the mom part. Then I called my own family, which is probably what Hoover wanted all along.

FAQ

When was Regretting You published?

Montlake Romance published it on December 10, 2019. The paperback runs 387 pages and the ISBN is 9781542016421.

Who are the main characters?

Morgan Grant, her daughter Clara, Miller Adams, Jonah Sullivan, and Chris and Jenny, whose deaths start the story.

Is Regretting You part of a series?

No, it stands alone, though it shares Hoover's themes of grief and young love with books like Reminders of Him.