We’re back with Colleen Hoover for the LiteraryHype buddy read of February, but who knows when I’ll actually get around to posting this. Lol. My gang of word nerds and I read It Starts With Us by Colleen Hoover [Buy Bookshop Amazon], since we read It Ends With Us [Buy Bookshop Amazon] in January.

If you haven’t read the first book, then come back to this review later because to review book two, I will have to spoil book one a bit.

Ready?

Ok. Here we go. You can’t be mad at me about book one spoilers starting now.

It Starts With Us picks up pretty quickly after the conclusion of It Ends With Us. At that point, Lily ran into Atlas right after dropping off her daughter with Ryle. It was an interaction full of hope and she agrees to a date with Atlas. However, Lily is still concerned about how Ryle will handle her moving on without him. Without saying too much, those concerns are entirely valid. It becomes a pretty rocky situation for all involved.

Overall, I enjoyed this one more than the first, but I’m giving it the same number of stars. That’s because parts of it felt entirely lazy. Specifically, some of the journal entries from the first part are straight copy-pasted into the second. If you’re gonna do a sequel, do it well. Don’t phone it in like that because it starts to feel like a money grab. Bottom line, it’s basically a really long epilogue that didn’t need to be a whole second book.