Book Review for "It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover"

Summary:

Sometimes it is the one who loves you who hurts you the most.

Lily hasn’t always had it easy, but that’s never stopped her from working hard for the life she wants. She’s come a long way from the small town in Maine where she grew up — she graduated from college, moved to Boston, and started her own business. So when she feels a spark with a gorgeous neurosurgeon named Ryle Kincaid, everything in Lily’s life suddenly seems almost too good to be true.

Ryle is assertive, stubborn, maybe even a little arrogant. He’s also sensitive, brilliant, and has a total soft spot for Lily. And the way he looks in scrubs certainly doesn’t hurt. Lily can’t get him out of her head. But Ryle’s complete aversion to relationships is disturbing. Even as Lily finds herself becoming the exception to his “no dating” rule, she can’t help but wonder what made him that way in the first place.

As questions about her new relationship overwhelm her, so do thoughts of Atlas Corrigan — her first love and a link to the past she left behind. He was her kindred spirit, her protector. When Atlas suddenly reappears, everything Lily has built with Ryle is threatened.

MY RATING: 3/5 stars

Genre: Fiction, Romance, Contemporary, New Adult

Author: Colleen Hoover

"Sometimes it's the one who loves you who hurts you the most"

It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover is a novel that explores a woman's journey through love and eventually her resilience and courage to break the cycle of abuse she found herself in.

It Ends With Us revolves around Lily Bloom, a young woman who finds herself torn between her past love, Atlas, and her current love, Ryle Kincaid. The novel goes back and forth between the past where Lily is a young woman with a propensity for watching Ellen DeGeneres, and the present, where she runs a flower shop. The past mainly explores her childhood that is marked by her father's abusive behaviors, and her love for a young, homeless boy named Atlas. While in the present, Lily Bloom is a business woman running a flower shop, and eventually develops a relationship with Ryle, a neurosurgeon. At first, Ryle is everything Lily has ever wanted and hoped for, but as their relationship progresses, she soon realizes Ryle is not who she thinks he is, and must confront her deepest fears surrounding love and abuse.

While It Ends With Us is widely popular amongst readers, I will admit that for me personally, I didn't really understand the hype. It wasn't a bad book by any means, and was far from the worse book I have ever read, but it wasn't this amazing book that changed my world or led to any type of soul searching.

I have largely avoided Colleen Hoover's books since high school, but once I started seeing her books get popular once more, especially on social media and booktok, I decided to give her books a try again. While It Ends With Us certainly isn't her worst book, I also felt like it was overhyped and quite underdeveloped. As is typical of Colleen Hoover's novels, her writing felt very junior high school to me. 15 year old me would have certainly eaten this book up, however as an adult I couldn't help but notice some level of immaturity to it. Point in hand, the heroine is named Lily Bloom and owns a flower shop. I couldn't think of anything more corny or cliché than that. Another example would be Lily opening a shop and a random woman walking in and willing to work for free because she's rich and wants to try new things. I don't know about you, but there is no world where the rich wouldn't want to get richer.

Additionally, while her relationship with Ryle was one that was supposed to make us fall in love with him, and then, similar to Lily, start becoming wary of him, I felt like it wasn't the most well developed abuse story out there. It felt almost as if Colleen Hoover wanted to write a romance novel centered around a love triangle and then decided to pivot and make it an abuse story.

My favorite parts that I did enjoy reading was Lily's past relationship with Atlas. In a way, while that portion was still written very high school like, it made sense to me for it to be written that way because truthfully they were two young kids falling in love. I loved Atlas and wished there was more of that childhood love aspect. Either way, I am definitely interested in seeing where their story goes.

All in all I didn't hate this novel, but I didn't love it either. It definitely had its faults (eg. the writing was very immature to me) but also had some strengths (eg. Atlas and Lily's relationship). I did appreciate how Colleen Hoover delves into the complexities of human emotions especially surrounding love. Lily's internal struggle to either stay or leave Ryle was palpable, and a struggle I felt was all too familiar amongst many of us.

I would definitely recommend this novel to readers that are just starting out their journey into romance novels. However, I do believe there are better written romance novels or novels that are centered around abuse than this particular one.

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