It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover

Title: It Ends With Us

Author: Colleen Hoover

Publisher: Atria Books

Release Date: August 2, 2016

Source: ARC from Publisher

Buy the Book: Amazon / Book Depository / Indigo

Sometimes it is the one who loves you who hurts you the most.

Lily hasn’t always had it easy, but that’s never topped 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. 

With this bold and deeply personal novel, Colleen Hoover delivers a heart-wrenching story that breaks exciting new ground for her as a writer. Combining a captivating romance with a cast of all-too-human characters, It Ends With Us is an unforgettable tale of love that comes at the ultimate price.

Every book I read by Colleen Hoover becomes a favourite. There’s no way around it. But even then, whenever I pick up a new one I can’t help but be afraid it won’t live up to the expectations I have. But every time those expectations are more than surpassed. And it was no different with It Ends With Us.

I am a big lover of all of Colleen Hoover’s books. The way she writes and tells stories always manages to both break my heart and give me hope in love. Reading the synopsis for It Ends With Us I thought I was going to be in for a the usual Colleen Hoover story. But as I found out more about the book and more reviews started popping up, I realized that this story was going to be completely different from the rest. If you’re picking up It Ends With Us expecting a typical romance, you’ll be disappointed because that’s not all what this is. Yes, there’s a romance element since much of the book is about how Lily fell in love with Ryle in the present and how she fell in love with Atlas when she was a teenager. And, yes, at first it does read like a typical romance but very quickly there are hints that things are not going to go the way you think they will. Instead of a love story between a boy and a girl, it’s a story about a girl loving herself and putting herself instead of her relationship first, no matter how hard that was to do. And that’s where the power of the story is: it shows the reader that no matter how strong you think you are, those hard decisions are always going to be hard and that your happily ever after may not look the way you thought it would. 

It Ends With Us is very much Lily’s story, whether that’s her story with Ryle in the present or her story with Atlas in the past. But more than being about her relationship with either guy, it’s about her choosing herself over either guy. There were so many times where I struggled with reading Lily’s story. And I mean that in a good way because it wasn’t an easy story to read. As much as I knew she deserved better than someone like Ryle, someone who had the potential to physically hurt her, I could see how she was struggling to put herself first and protect herself because of her feelings for him. While reading, I understood her struggle and I understood how even the strongest of people can end up in situations like the one Lily finds herself in. And much like Lily, despite everything, there were moments when I really like Ryle, moments when I wanted to believe that his anger was just a one off thing and that it wouldn’t happen again. As for Atlas, for a long time I wasn’t sure what I thought of him. And I think that had to do in large part with how I felt about Ryle. I didn’t want to be disappointed by both men in this story, I wanted one of them to be good for Lily. And after everything, I couldn’t help but doubt that Atlas could be that for her. And I was more than happy to be proved wrong. 

With It Ends With Us Colleen Hoover wrote a powerful and heartbreaking story that needed to be told. It wasn’t easy to read, in fact there were times when it was painful, but that’s what made this story so great. It broke my heart, but it also gave me hope.