By Alicia Bartolotta
If you’ve been on the internet recently you’ve probably heard of the author Colleen Hoover. A 43-year-old writer whose romance novel, “It Ends With Us,” made great waves during its debut in 2016. Recently it was announced the book was being turned into a movie, so I decided it was time to see what all the talk was about. This is my honest review of “It Ends With Us,” so a slight spoiler warning ahead.
The book starts as a very generic romance novel. The protagonist has gone through a major life change, she meets a boy, they fall in love, conflict gets in their way, they get through it and the end. Honestly, I didn’t really enjoy the first half of the book. It felt simple to me but there were some parts I really found interesting. The protagonist of this story is Lily Bloom. Her major life change is the death of her father. However, this is not the death of a mentor or even the death of a man she loved. Her father abused her mother throughout Lily’s whole childhood. This detail is extremely important to the story, though Lily mentions it casually. Her doing so was interesting to me as I felt it accurately addressed the stigma around domestic abuse.
The person she mentions it to is Ryle Kincaid, a neurosurgeon Lily meets on the night of her father’s funeral. They do this thing called honest truths where they say exactly what is on their mind no matter how personal or upsetting it may be. It’s a cute couple thing they do and it’s done throughout the whole book.
Another part of the first half that I really liked was the addition of the Ellen letter. These were letters Lily wrote but never sent to Ellen DeGeneres when she was fifteen. It was her version of a diary because she thought it was embarrassing. These letters tell the reader of Lily’s first love Atlas, a homeless boy a couple of years older than her, who she helped survive. However, when her father found out about him he tried to kill Atlas. I enjoyed the story of Atlas because it gave insight into why Lily became the woman she is. Atlas was the first person who believed in her, giving her the strength to leave her childhood home and move to Boston, a place the two always talked about.
At this point, I thought the ending of the book was going to be predictable. Atlas would come back into her life but Lily and Ryle would push through it and come out in the end as a perfect couple. However, there is a plot twist before Atlas returns that took me by surprise. One night while Ryle and Lily are cooking, Ryle hits Lily after she laughs at him for burning his hand. This turn in the story is so shocking because I thought this was the couple the audience was supposed to be rooting for. Even after she decided to stay with him and Lily gets to see Atlas again at his restaurant, I texted my boyfriend, “I think I’m supposed to root for the abusive guy.” That is because Colleen Hoover did a great job portraying Lily’s thought process. The back and forth of being angry that he hit her but wanting to believe it was an accident, to thinking about leaving him but knowing how hard it will be with all their ties to one another made me not wanna put the book down.
Ryle ends up abusing Lily two more times throughout the novel. The last time is pretty graphic and it has to do with sexual assault. I thought this part was really crucial to the story but I wish that the start of the book gave a trigger warning towards it because it was a lot to take in.
Now I do not want to spoil who Lily ends up with, if it is anyone at all, or the entire ending of the book. I do want to say, however, that when getting to the end it brought a tear to my eye knowing why the book has its title. Also, read the epilogue! It gives a lot of closure to the first half of Lily’s story.
All in all I really enjoyed “It Ends With Us” by Colleen Hoover. Though it did have a pretty slow start the ending was definitely worth it. This book definitely did not change my life as some people on “Booktok ” say it does, but it averted my expectations of what a romance novel usually is and I’ll definitely be checking out the sequal, “It Starts With Us,” soon!