Book Review: It Ends With Us By Colleen Hoover

Featured image by Amber on Instagram.

Book Title: It Ends With Us

Author: Colleen Hoover

Release Date: 2 August, 2016

Publisher: Atria

Rating: 4.5/5 stars.

Goodreads Synopsis

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 Thoughts

This book was one of my early reads this year. I’d actually started it last year but couldn’t finish it as I got distracted. Other things (coughs* twitter* coughs) had my attention. With that out of the way, I could finish the book this year.

Okay, so I was pretty much not a fan of the book at the beginning. I was hooked yeah, but all the perfection and happy moments were starting to make me sick. Maybe I was sort of in a bad mood then and couldn’t relate. Anyways, Lily, our lead character isn’t all too perfect per se, her father had died and she didn’t really feel bad because he’d been abusing her mother, his wife, both physically and emotionally. Lily kind of resented her mother a little for not leaving him.

Her love interest, Ryle is a neurosurgeon with a dark past which Lily wasn’t aware of until much much later into the book. We were introduced to them in the first chapter of the book and the few following chapters after that was just about them bonding and Lily going after her dream. It was the all too happy, perfect moment that almost made me sick. I’m sucker for romance novels but I know it doesn’t always have to be perfect. Don’t you agree?

Anyways, there’s another character that kept coming up, Atlas, Lily’s childhood love interest. We got to learn more about him and her childhood, from entries Lily wrote, in form of letters, to Ellen DeGeneres and I was hoping she could meet this Atlas again because he was so kind and sweet. Ryle has a sister, Alyssa, who Lily became best friends with and I loved their friendship. Alyssa is a Pinterest freak and that was one of the most relatable parts for me, haha.

Lily and Ryle were still going strong until something happened. All it took was fifteen seconds, fifteen seconds and everything changed and I screamed hallelujah! Let the drama unfold. Well, I shouldn’t have done that, seeing that most of that drama is mostly traumatic and heartbreaking. Lily found herself in the same place her mother had been all those years ago and it made her realize how little she understood everything just by looking from outside.

Lily and Ryle’s relationship became rocky and with Atlas in the picture later on, it became nearly unbearable. But Lily loved Ryle and kept giving him second chances. This she realized her mother must have been doing with her father, that there were good parts of him that her mother kept holding onto and couldn’t let go of. So, Lily’s mother played a huge role in this story.

Despite all of it, Lily kept going strong. She realized her mother has always been the strongest person and started to admire her for it.

I didn’t know the whole point of the book was to make her readers look at domestic violence from a new perspective until that first fifteen seconds happened. It honestly made me change my view on the whole thing because I also, would constantly ask myself in the past, why victims couldn’t just leave their abusive partners. I know for a fact money could be one of the reasons but I didn’t consider the love aspect. The love for that one side, just that little good side they (the abusers) show sometimes and I know it’s not an enough reason to stay but this book made me realize I’d never understand all of it. I think Colleen wrote it perfectly and handled it well. The way she eased it into the story without making it overwhelming, especially for an emotional chunk like me, says alot.

It’s got a nice twist at the end, I’d leave it up to you to check out the book. Don’t mind what I said about the all too happy, perfect moment, I can be grumpy at times. If you feel it’s something you’d enjoy, check it out.

---

A side note: Whether you’re married or not, if you’re currently in an abusive relationship, I sympathize with you. It’s not enough but I want you to know that you’re not any weaker for staying and enduring it. Take care.

---

Ah and I just found out it’s going to be a movie. I’m actually excited to see it so I can compare the book and the movie and rant if they didn’t follow most of the plot ;).

Alot of people I follow have read the book. Have you read it? What did you think about it? If you haven’t, would you want to read it?

Thanks for reading.

Stay safe.