REVIEW: It Ends With Us (book) by Colleen Hoover

It Ends With Us is, I suppose, marketed as romance, but I'd call it more women's fiction. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Domestic abuse is a huge part of this story. Don't be fooled by the romance novel trappings and marketing.

This is the story of Lily, a young woman who grew up wondering why her mother stayed with her abusive father. Now her father is dead, and Lily has moved to Boston and started up her own business, a flower shop. Her father's death and other events prompt her to think about her past, so she gradually reads her way through her teenage diary entries (which were always structured like letters to her favorite celebrity, Ellen DeGeneres). Her diary reminds her of her first love, Atlas, a young man who ran away from his own abusive family and lived for a time in the abandoned house next door to Lily's home. 

As Lily reminisces about Atlas, she meets Ryle, an ambitious surgeon who tells her right from the start that he isn't interested in relationships or romance. Still, they're attracted to each other, and Lily gradually falls in love. As things with Ryle take a turn and he becomes abusive, Lily has to grapple with complicated emotions and memories of her past. She becomes even more torn when she runs into Atlas for the first time in years.

I know after I read Verity that I said I probably wasn't going to read another one of Hoover's books, but here we are. I ended up caving out of curiosity about the movie showing at Book Bonanza that I was too tired to attend. One thing I feel I should mention: I don't believe the words "domestic violence" or "abuse" were ever used in any of Colleen Hoover and Blake Lively's on-stage movie marketing. Maybe it was assumed audience members would likely already know about that aspect, or maybe Hoover was still thinking of it as some kind of spoiler. I feel like it should have been mentioned more directly.

Anyway, I generally liked Lily but felt that she had a somewhat simplistic way of viewing the world. For some reason she seemed to equate "donates to charity" with "is a good person" - this came up often enough that it kind of irked me. 

I know that Hoover wanted to look at the complexities of domestic violence and the reasons why women might choose to stay with men who abused them, but I feel like even here it was treated in a relatively simplistic way. Basically, Lily loved Ryle, and it's not like he drank like her father, or tried to trap and isolate her. That makes him a good guy who just occasionally does bad things, right? (That's sarcasm, by the way.)

The ending pissed me off. It was presented like Lily was breaking the cycle of abuse, but the end result was that Ryle was still a part of her life. Reading the description for the next book made me even more upset with the way this one ended.

Extras:

A note by the author in which she discusses the inspiration for this book.