Warning: spoilers ahead and 

(Editor’s Note: the book and article discuss physical abuse)

Here is my hot take of 2022: “It Ends With Us” doesn’t live up to its reviews. Nonetheless, I felt that I had to give Colleen Hoover a second chance by reading the sequel, “It Starts With Us”. 

Lily is the main character of both books.

 In the first book, she met a man named Ryle. They eventually started dating and later got married. 

Not long after, Ryle finds Lily’s old journals that she frequently wrote in as a teenager.

In high school, she met a homeless teenager, named Atlas, that she took in and wrote about in her journals. Over time they fell in love, but it didn’t end up working out because Atlas left Lily’s hometown. 

After Ryle finds these journals, Lily runs into Atlas and they begin to see each other more often. Ryle is jealous of this and begins to have aggressive outbursts of anger and he physically abuses Lily repeatedly. 

So, Lily builds up the courage to get a divorce. The one problem is that Lily finds out she is pregnant with Ryle’s child. 

In “It Ends With Us” I felt that the book started off slow as did “It Starts With Us”. Hoover takes the first 50 pages of both books to explain the day to day life of Lily, which slows down the plot. 

Throughout the book, Atlas reads over Lily’s journal and relives the moments she wrote about. 

It is clear that Hoover tried to add this detail in the book to develop the plot, but it was truly a waste of pages. It was completely unnecessary. 

While parts of the book were intolerable at times, there were some parts that I really enjoyed. 

When Atlas and Lily’s teenage years are revisited in the book, it created intrigue. 

Additionally, I appreciate how Hoover included Atlas’ perspective in the book to explain events that happened in the past. This perspective brought a better understanding of the plot to both the first and the second books.

What’s more, Hoover includes a new character addition, which in turn, leads Atlas back to people of his childhood and past. 

A new character, Josh, is introduced as Atlas’ brother that he never knew of. 

Atlas realized that Josh is his brother after a mysterious person was vandalizing his restaurants. 

Within the story, Josh’s personality and the way Atlas treated him after just meeting him mesh so well.

When Josh decides to meet his father, Atlas agrees to take Josh, but Atlas is forced to remember a man and stepfather who abused and neglected him as a child through this trip. 

This is refreshing after the first book with Ryle and the abuse Lily endured from him. The second book captured more of a happy part of Lily’s life, versus the first book which had a tone of negativity. 

While this book wasn’t intolerable, the ending felt anticlimactic and important details were skipped. The end was too rushed. 

Overall, I would give the book 7/10 stars. The sequel book of  It Starts With Us definitely had some wonderful parts, but many parts of the book were too slow and dull for my liking.