What is the Colleen Hoover controversy about?

Author Colleen Hoover controversy became a topic of conversation in January following her plan to release a colouring book inspired by ‘It Ends With Us.’ For anyone that has read the book, it centres heavily around the topics of domestic violence and trauma.

Colleen Hoover’s readers began criticizing the author for the ‘tone-deaf’ approach to capitalizing on the success of the book by creating a colouring book. The author posted on her Instagram addressing the criticism saying, ““The colouring book was developed with Lily’s strength in mind, but I can absolutely see how this was tone-deaf.”

She added, “I hear you guys and I agree with you. No excuses. No finger-pointing. I have contacted the publisher to let them know I would prefer we don’t move forward with it. Thank you for the respectful discourse and accountability. Nothing but love.” Her publishing company, Atria Books also announced officially they would not move forward with publishing ‘The Official It Ends With Us Coloring Book’.

Her bestselling novel, ‘It Ends With Us’, is also being developed into a movie with Blake Lively set to star as protagonist Lily, which is also receiving its fair share of critiques on Tik Tok and Instagram. People have have also commented that the author has glorified abuse in some of her work.

Outside of that, last year Colleen Hoover was at the centre of more controversy as her son was accused of sexual harassment on Twitter. On February 12th, 2022, a Twitter user with the handle @theonottlovebot tweeted, “Her son also sexually harassed me and she blocked me when I spoke up about it to her.” She added in a follow up tweet,”Long story short, we were friends on [Snapchat] and s–t and like every day we would message cause we’re friends right and like this was when I was 16 and he was fully aware of how old I was I was cause I always talked about the fact I was still in school.”