There are those books all over booktok and bookstagram that make you wonder if they really are worth the hype. It Ends With Us [Buy Bookshop Amazon] by Colleen Hoover is one of those. But this book doesn’t just come with positive hype, and that’s part of why I procrastinated picking it up. Like, I even waited until the end of the month when I was hosting a buddy read of it. I’m the best at procrastinating.

But alas, I kept with my responsibilities and read it.

It Ends With Us follows a character with the most ridiculous of names, Lily Blossom Bloom, through two parts of her life. In the more modern timeline, we start when she’s on a rooftop in Boston following her father’s funeral and she meets Ryle. He’s a doctor who is pretty blunt about his attraction to her and how he does nothing but one night stands. So, they part ways for the time being. The reunite months later when Lily is working to open a flower shop and the girl she hires to help happens to be Ryle’s sister. Of course, they end up getting together and things continue from there.

That story is intertwined with journal entries from teenage Lily. She wrote her journal is if she was writing letters to Ellen DeGeneres, telling her about the homeless boy on her bus, Atlas. He’s living in an abandoned house near her and she decides to help him when her parents aren’t home. This turns into a friendship, which develops into her first love.

These two storylines collide in the present day, and it gets messy. The mess is where it gets controversial.

This is a story that deals heavily with domestic abuse. Lily witnesses it as a child from her father, and then as an adult, Ryle gets physical with her. I knew of the domestic abuse side going into the story, which is why I was hesitant. I really struggled to want to read it because I didn’t want to like a character who got violent with his partner.

There is a vast camp who wants this novel trashed because they feel like it romanticizes domestic violence. I don’t know that I would go that far entirely. It Ends With Us is categorized as romance, and I definitely don’t think that’s an accurate genre. It should be classified as women’s fiction. I feel like if that if it was correctly categorized, that would at least reduce the views that it romanticizes abuse.

That being said, I do think it gives readers a valuable perspective inside an abusive relationship. So many people judge women for staying with their abusers, so this story highlights what goes on in their minds when they are in that position. The author’s note is really important for understanding what Hoover was trying to do with the story.

Overall, I think that this is a decent story, but it is definitely not romance. Aside from Lily’s terrible name/occupation combo, the characters are well-developed and it’s a story that makes you feel things, which is what good fiction does. However, I agree that canceling the coloring book based on this book is absolutely the right call and was a horrible concept from the start.

I will be continuing on with It Starts With Us [Buy Bookshop Amazon] with my buddy read group, so we’ll see how I feel about that one later.