I’ve been wondering about this. Colleen Hoover is well known as the sort of poster girl for sloppily written, baffling and aggressively mediocre books.
What was the equivalent to her in previous times? Like the Romantic or Modernist period?
During the the 1890s, what book was considered “embarassing” or super low brow to be caught with (in the same way the book community largely treats It Ends With Us)?
These books have existed for a while, at least since the romantic and gothic literature in the 1800s. In 1856 Flaubert satirized romance novels with Madame Bovary (not just romance, but really just satirizing culture at the time, which hasn’t changed much since) and man, it’s hard to find anybody as good.