Book Review: It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover

Originally uploaded on Instagram. 2020 Copyright.

** spoiler alert **

THE GOLDEN HOUR IS A PERIOD OF TIME WHEREIN THINGS CAN BE AS PERFECT as anyone can imagine. It's a vista where time seems to be truly non-existent and everything falls in a perfect place. It can be a reflection of our deepest dream unfolding to reality. But this hour can also burn along with the reality we tend to hide; it can break us to pieces and beyond repair.

For Lily Bloom, five minutes was all it took to completely destroy her life-long held beliefs and definitions of the words love, relationships, and trust before she was thrown into a cavernous pit of melancholy. Before she had to find a way to keep swimming to the shore for salvation.

Colleen Hoover’s 2016 offer, It Ends With Us, tells a story of Lily Bloom, an ordinary teenager from the small town of Maine. Lily grew up as an only child with a complete family. She was given her basic needs growing up including garden tools to maintain her small spot in their backyard. However, Lily could have well grown in a dysfunctional and broken family altogether not with her witnessing the abuse her mother endured at the hands of her father.

What does a little girl dream of growing in a family where her father does not lift a hand on her wife? So, Lily would often interject whenever her parents got into a fight. Her interjections sometimes work and her father would stop. Until one time where she was shoved off and she fell on the floor, which led to her father leaving and she being rushed to the emergency room.

She grew up and graduated. Worked in marketing for a while before moving to Boston and started her own floral shop. She met brooding neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid at the rooftop of a building one night following her father’s funeral.

One thing led to another and the found their lives intertwined in the most unexpected way…and a complicated one. Ryle only subscribed to one-night-stands before she met Lily. Lily wouldn’t have anything less than a romantic relationship. Eventually, the two decided to run a trial of what it’s like to be in a romantic relationship until Ryle caved in and took Lily as his girlfriend.

Just as when Lily had her life together with Ryle being a central part of it, things started to crumble down with the return of her first love, Atlas Corrigan. Ryle emerges out of his composed and loving persona and turned to an abusive husband to Lily. Lily had to face the paralyzing horror of waking up with cuts to her head and an abusive husband beside her as she tries to reconnect with Atlas and find salvation in his piercing blue eyes.

Hoover unapologetically touches on the subject of domestic violence and gave words to a question so often gets unanswered: why do we stay in situations, relationships, that break us to pieces beyond repair. It's her ability to saw this timely issue to a love story every reader can relate to, and actually bring the readers to a journey full of emotional booby traps, which makes Hoover an awesome author. Her writing just keeps getting better and better with every title she puts out.

The book also holds so much truth in telling love, despite how irrational it can get, is the reason why we do choose to stay in abusive, often unsustainable, predicaments. Hoover tries to reason out why some of us choose to stay in the relationship but she did what most of us are afraid to do: leave. She compensates the emotional rollercoaster ride readers will feel for Lily as she decides to get a divorce from Ryle to save whatever was left of her love for him. To save their daughter, Emerson, eternal damnation if she ever sees her father lifting a hand on her mother.

This book has left me to pieces I haven’t yet fully collected from the floor as I feel for both Lily and Ryle. I have been in a relationship where I got to be Lily–emotionally abused and yet I stayed because I thought I loved my partner and saw the goodness in him despite knowing he cheated on me on several occasions. But I was also Ryle, who clung to the hopes Lily would see the situation through and will give me another chance to make things right.

If this book will not get you ugly crying, you need to see a psychiatrist because this book should make or break someone emotionally.