Rating: 100% | A+ | ★★★★★ Warnings: + Domestic abuse + Sexual assault + Violence + Emotional abuse + Sexual content Synopsis (from Goodreads): Sometimes it is the one who loves you who hurts you the most. 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. Spoiler-Free Section: Here it is: another addition to the le livre en rose 100% club. I worry that I may be prematurely rating It Ends with Us too high—I just finished it last night at 11:30 P.M.—but I know that if I don't write this review soon, this novel will never let me go. So here we are. I have a confession. Colleen Hoover is known for tearjerking, heartbreaking books, but when I read Ugly Love (review forthcoming, hopefully!) two days ago, I was somewhat underwhelmed. Still teary, but not as teary as I thought I would be. Then, responding to some masochistic instinct within me yearning to test the waters of the Colleen Hoover oeuvre, I picked up It Ends with Us fewer than 24 hours later. It Ends with Us shatters—earth, you, heart. It is a complete and thorough examination of domestic abuse and love that will leave the reader curled up in fetal position at 2 A.M. eschewing sleep because they can't stop crying. (Not speaking from personal experience.) The characters are complex and beautifully present the duality of humans and the nuances of situations. There are no "right" answers at the end of this book, and that is what makes it so unique and heartbreaking. The synopsis of the book does it no justice. Go into this book blind, but don't ignore the content warnings. If you are sensitive to any of the issues discussed above, this may not be the book for you. (Click "Read More" for spoilers.) Plot (30/30) The refreshing thing about giving a book a perfect score is that I don't have to delineate my discussion by stages of the plot. The plot of It Ends with Us is perfectly paced. Unlike Ugly Love, I greatly appreciated the parallel timelines. Lily's diary entries tied together her past and her present without fully immersing the reader in the past. As the plot unfolds, so does Lily's life—the beginnings of her relationships with both Ryle and Atlas, the start of her financial independence, the start of her friendship with Allyssa, the blossoming of her life in Boston. It's a plot arc choice that the reader doesn't realize until the end. I highly encourage any reader who hasn't yet read Colleen Hoover's author's note to go back and read it. Novels are often represented as 50/50 relationship between the author and the reader, but It Ends with Us isn't perfectly balanced that way. Hoover notes that as much as she wanted to scrap scenes and make Ryle a better person or to make Lily make the right choices, she couldn't—it wouldn't be true to the story she wanted to tell. And so those beginning chapters, those chapters where the reader falls in love with Ryle, can't be discounted either. They're part of the good and the bad, no matter how much we want to ignore it. I gasped when Ryle lashed out for the first time, pushing Lily to the ground. (I have an annotation that reads, in all caps, "I GASPED.") A sick feeling gradually emerged inside me as the story progressed, as Ryle's violence began to hang over my head and Lily's head. The most heartbreaking discussion in the book—or one of them, seeing as there are too many to choose from—occurs when Lily notes that she has become a statistic. I'm a statistic now. The things I've thought about women like me are now what others would think of me if they knew my current situation. The moment when the title makes sense also deserves an honorable mention; I can't stop thinking about it. At the end of the day, I hesitate to call It Ends with Us a romance book. The romantic in me wants to whittle the story down to Lily and Atlas's reunion at the end of the novel, but the truth is that the story ended when Lily left Ryle. Everything after that is hope for the future, but the act of leaving Ryle is what ensures Lily a future in the first place. Characters (30/30) The characters drive this novel. One of my issues with both It Ends with Us and Ugly Love is that neither novel is particularly plot-driven. The plots are good, but what makes both books stunning is the characters. Hoover's refusal to vilify Ryle is a complex and daring one, and one that I—and other readers, too, I suspect—don't fully agree with. But the story and its interpretations, as I mentioned before, aren't 50/50 in my hands. It Ends with Us isn't meant to be a cautionary tale or a soapbox lecture. It's meant to show the world as it is rather than as it ought to be. Recognition must also be given to Allyssa, Marshall, and Lily's mother, who, in their own refusals to completely condemn Ryle, become three-dimensional, complex people. I particularly valued reading about Allyssa and Lily's relationship; rarely do I see that kind of uncomplicated, mutual dedication. Writing (20/20) Hoover's writing is incandescent. She captures emotion honestly, without any frills. While some of her dialogue is cheesy, the vast majority of the prose is sincere and keeps the story at a good pace. There is a plethora of quotes I have highlighted in my copy of It Ends with Us, but this is the one that stuck with me the most: But sometimes the reason women go back is simply because they're in love. I love my husband, Ellen. I love so many things about him. Closure/Set-Up (20/20)
As I mentioned before, it would be easy to say that the end of the story occurs at the very end when Lily and Atlas reunite. But for me, the true resolution comes when Lily leaves Ryle. There's a finality in that moment, in Lily accepting what she cannot change. That being said, I love the ending. Thinking about the complexities of Lily and Atlas's future family and how Ryle fits into all of that has me in over my head, but I'm content with accepting that it's always been them—Lily and Atlas, Atlas and Lily—and it will be until the end.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
ReviewsThe Ice Swan
For the Wolf Must Love Books People We Meet on Vacation The Spanish Love Deception The Dating Game One Night Only We Are the Brennans A Letter to Three Witches It Ends with Us When Sparks Fly A Far Wilder Magic Bad Luck Bridesmaid Always, in December Kingdom of the Cursed Bibliophile: Diverse Spines Five Tuesdays in Winter The Ex Hex An Heiress's Guide to Deception and Desire How to Love Your Neighbor On a Night Like This Birds of California Beautiful World, Where Are You The Rebound The Best Books of 2021 |