It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover

3/5 Stars

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

I went into this book not knowing what it was about which, in hindsight, was a bad idea because I went into this thinking it was your standard love story. But that is not what it was.

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.

Welp, with that out of the way, I really enjoyed the message this novel brought to light regarding love, relationships, the way we judge others, and women's strength. But the way Colleen Hoover decided to approach some of these difficult topics, which may be triggering to some people, just seemed a little cheesy. For instance, when Altas suddenly goes from being a character that Lily would write about in her diary and someone that she had a grand love story with when they were teenagers, it begins to feel a bit phony when he suddenly reappears in her life right when things with Ryle start getting aggressive. Then pretty soon after ending things with Ryle, Lily ends up with Atlas who has just been coincidentally waiting for her all this time. This just did not at all seem within any realm of possibility to me.

Lily and Atlas were great characters to me, but I hated Ryle from the beginning (dumb name included).

The message of this book is awesome and definitely something the needs more attention, but at times it felt a little artificial. I didn't hate it but I didn't love it either.