It Ends With Us By Colleen Hoover

 

It Ends With Us 2/5

It Ends with Us is an ok book by Colleen Hoover about toxic and complicated relationships. The book starts with a young woman called Lily, who is trying to start her own life by owning a flower shop. She comes across Ryle who is a highly intelligent surgeon who has a liking towards Lily. I think the book is a great way to promote abusive relationships and the idea of those relationships being nice and loving at the start without the abuse. The book was an easy read and I kept wondering if Lily was ever going to leave Ryle or go to her other lover Atlas (who is a chef but was homeless when he met Lily). I think Colleen's writing was good and raised awareness of the difficulty of leaving a relationship such as Lily’s and Ryle’s as you remember how they used to be and being in love with their good qualities. I do think the book is quite predictable in part and I hate the pregnancy trope which many books like these use. That could just be a personal thing but I would have liked Lily to leave on her own accord not because she was accepting a child. I think having a baby is quite a cheap cop-out for many romance books and it can get quite repetitive and overused. I did find the letters Lily wrote to Ellen throughout the book became quite long and slightly boring. I think it took you out of the present for too long and it got quite annoying they became longer throughout. Even though the letters were giving you information about her past (Atlas) I believe there could have been a better and more interesting way to show her past as the letter became quite dull and skippable. I think the characters were interesting but it did feel quite generic in some places. I do believe the film which came out recently about this book went in the wrong direction with the characters and the film (which I have not watched) seems quite cheesy and a bit unbelievable. The topics of this book are real, dark and serious and watching the adverts and listening to other people's views I think the film did not promote the dangerous aspect of abuse and to be honest in some aspects neither did the book. I felt like Colleen (although trying to promote the dangerous behaviours of Ryle) was romanticising it to the reader a bit too much. Ryle is supposed to be a dangerous character who has issues with his anger and takes it out on Lily physically, emotionally and mentally, but the more you read on it feels like Colleen wants him to have a redemption arc and to feel sorry for the character. This turns me off the book in some way because as someone trying to promote the dangerous and difficult life of living with someone abusive, it is almost like we should feel love towards the character Ryle and believe Lily “can change him”. This is quite a messed-up mindset. However, I think the book is okay, nothing special, not life-changing, just ok. I do not believe that it will help anyone with these problems, I think it will make them believe that they can change the abuser. I do not believe that it is the victim's responsibility to try and change someone abusive, they should try to get out of that situation and focus on healing themselves.