Gonna start up top with a warning for domestic violence, assault, and also a shit ton of spoilers of many Colleen Hoover books.
In the past few years I’ve become a big reader again, and I’ve started to receive a lot of book-related content in my social media algorithms. While I’m not particularly in the “booktok” community (I’m not like other girls and don’t read too many steamy romance novels these days—I did enough of that in high school), I do get a lot of content related to what the book girls are talking about, which means I have seen plenty of stuff about some author named Colleen Hoover.
For a long time, even deep in controversy and discourse, I did not know who Colleen Hoover was. The covers of her books that I saw looked like they belong in the tiny book section of a Wal-Mart and so I really paid no mind. But then I started to see person after person on my social media feed start talking about Hoover a lot. There are two camps of opinions about Colleen Hoover: you either love her and think she is the best romance author to ever craft a story in the history of womankind, or she is the worst writer to exist and should be in jail for how she portrays romance. There seems to be no in-between, which is extreme but that’s the internet, baby!
My approach to forming an opinion on her was that I would listen to the people I respected the most and would just stick with that. If her books were absolute trash I didn’t want to give her my time, or let anyone on the train see me reading a book of hers after all. With a little bit of time and no actual research of my own, I soon became a Colleen Hoover hater. It seemed like only the right thing to do. As a certified Colleen Hoover hater, I was going to live in ignorance about how her books actually are, the same way that I will never know what the inside of an Ayn Rand book looks like, but I know it’s awful.
That is, until my coworker told me her boyfriend’s mom lent her a copy of It Ends With Us, saying that it was one of the best books she’s ever read.
My coworker was telling me about how the first page of the book was god awful and that there was no way she’d ever actually read the book from there. We read it together, and I agreed it was not great. I then offered to take it off her hands for a while, “for science” or whatever millennial-ism you’d like to use (to fit the theme of the book). I’ve been curious but too afraid to buy a copy or even pick it up from the library. I don’t want my local librarian to correlate MILL, R F with Colleen Hoover. That would totally ruin my anonymous street cred as someone who reads good books.
It took me a while to finish, since I was only reading it while I rode the exercise bike in the privacy of my own home, but we finally got there. I finished It Ends With Us, and let me tell you, it certainly was a book.
For those of you uninitiated, the book follows the perspective of a woman named Lily Bloom (like flowers, you get it? She owns a flower shop later on) who pulls a big stunt at her father’s funeral because she actually hated him for being abusive to her mom (understandable). She then goes and chills on the roof of a building she does not live in to look at how beautiful Boston is. Then, another guy comes up on the roof and starts kicking around the patio furniture in a fit of rage. He and Lily start talking and we learn his name is Ryle Kincaid. Ryle Kincaid has a stupid fucking name and is also a neurosurgeon and is very sexy to Lily. He immediately propositions her to have anonymous sex. He wants to bone but he hates feelings! She says no and leaves.
Remember how her name is Lily Bloom? She decides to open up a flower shop. A rich woman named Alyssa pops by and is like, “Hey I don’t need to work for money but I’m bored so I am your first employee.” That’s pretty much exactly how it goes. They become fast friends, best friends in like two seconds (for Lily to be in her mid-20s and single in a big city it’s actually insane that she doesn’t seem to have any kind of life or friends prior to the events in this book, just saying!). We then meet Alyssa’s husband, and wait, who is that? Ryle is also there because it turns out he’s Alyssa’s brother. How convenient!
Ryle immediately remembers that he is horny and starts propositioning Lily again to have sex. Just fucking though. She says no. Then some stuff happens that I forget but one night, Ryle ends up knocking on her door (he knocked on 29 other doors before finding her apartment) and goes down on his knees begging and pleading for her to fuck. It’s insane but she falls for it and then he’s like, “Actually I like you enough that I wanna fuck again. You’re the only person I haven’t only wanted to one-night stand with,” and that’s enough for Lily to get lost in the Ryle sauce.
They date for a few months. They go to a new restaurant. Lily finds out that one of the chefs at the restaurant is her ex-boyfriend, Atlas. I forgot to mention that during all this, Lily is reading through her teenage diary which is formatted in letters to Ellen DeGeneres of all people. I’m not kidding. If real-life Ellen DeGeneres knew a sad teenage girl was unloading all of her trauma in letters addressed to her, she would have Lily hunted for sport. Most of her diary entries are about how she slowly falls in love with the homeless boy (Atlas) at her school who is squatting in an abandoned house near her childhood home. He got kicked out of his mom’s house when he turned eighteen and then leaves Lily for her to finish school while he goes to Boston because “Everything is Better in Boston” (that is a lie). Now they are both in Boston.
I also forgot to mention that Ryle physically harms Lily before this after a casserole debacle and so he’s got bandages and she’s got a black eye. Atlas notices and asks Lily if she’s okay and then Ryle freaks out that Lily is talking to another man and gets even more mad that he’s actually her high school ex. This creates more problems in the future.
Ryle, being an enormous jackass, gets weird and overprotective of Lily. She brushes it off after he apologizes. This reminds her of the time that her dad used to abuse her mom, but she brushes it off because this sexy man can’t be bad like her dad, right? About six months into the relationship they get married in Vegas and then move in together in the same apartment building as Alyssa. Things are good until one day Ryle finds Atlas’s phone number stored in the back of her phone case. She also has a magnet that says “Better in Boston” on it, which is what Atlas named his restaurant after (he owns the restaurant actually) because Lily is still someone special to him. Ryle, because he has the temperament and brain size of a peanut, conflates this with Lily emotionally cheating on her husband and he assaults her again.
I may be getting things out of order at this point, but the gist is that Ryle will physically hurt Lily once in a blue moon after he gets angry about something, usually Atlas, and then will apologize, as is the cycle of domestic abuse a lot of the time. Then there’s the final straw where he headbutts her and sexually assaults her, she leaves and calls Atlas to go to the hospital.
There in the hospital she finds out that she’s been pregnant for several weeks. She hides out at Atlas’s house for a few days and then goes back home. Ryle kicks himself out and she tells her best friend and also sister-in-law what Ryle did to her. I also forgot to mention that part of Ryle’s backstory is that he killed his brother when they were children by shooting a gun he didn’t know was real and now he has anger issues. Alyssa tells her to not take him back (good advice). Then she tells her mom about the baby and the abuse and her mom also tells her to not take him back so that she doesn’t end up like her mom (also good advice). The baby is born, and Lily tells Ryle she wants a divorce. He cries a lot but then is like, “Yeah you’re right.”
The book ends in a way that I actually do like, but then Hoover decides to write an epilogue that is not good (but a way to promote the sequel of this story). Lily is co-parenting with Ryle and she meets Atlas on the street. She tells him that her daughter’s middle name (Emerson is her first name, after the dead brother. I also haven’t mentioned that Alyssa’s child’s name is Rylee. The names in this book are wild) is Dory. After Ellen DeGeneres’s character in Finding Nemo, a very important theme in Lily’s teenage diary. Then they hug and they’re dating now.
Wow! A lot of stuff happens in this book!
One of the biggest praises of Colleen Hoover by fans is that she’s not afraid to discuss difficult but important topics. Her biggest criticism by her haters is that she’s not actually doing anything with the difficult subject matter besides including it for shock value. From the author’s note at the back of It Ends With Us, Hoover explains that this novel in particular was inspired from her own mother’s history with domestic violence and how Hoover grew up with a strained relationship with her birth father and her better relationship with her stepfather. With the permission from her mom, Colleen incorporated some events that actually happened to her mom as things that happened to Lily in the book. In this way, unlike her other books, there is a personal element to it which makes it appear more genuine. That may be why this is a fan favorite to a lot of her readers.
I’ll be honest, while the writing style and tone of Lily’s narration was not my favorite by any means, I think it could have been worse. With how Colleen Hoover haters talk about her and this book, I was expecting Lily to get back with Ryle at the end because she still loves him and he can’t be that bad, or something. It Ends With Us does not seem to be so egregious to get all the hate that she was getting…and that’s when I looked up some of the synopses of her other books.
If there’s one thing you can say about Colleen Hoover, it’s that she has written a ton of books. One is done and she just keeps churning them out and out and out. I have not read any other books of hers besides the one I just finished, but to try and get a bit of an idea of what some of her other books are like, I read through a few summaries and watched a YouTube video or two from someone who did read more of the books.
What I’ve gathered from my minimal research is that all of her books are romances and they usually have some off-the-wall stuff happen in them. There’s one where a guy ends up dating and getting his stepsister pregnant and the same day the baby is born, it dies in a car accident. There’s another one where the guy can’t adopt a baby with his wife because he killed someone while drunk driving many years ago. There’s even a story where a girl was burned really badly in the face in a house fire many years ago and she falls in love with the guy who set the house on fire. This was just the surface, but there’s so much more.
While there’s always a dark element to these romances, usually with the male protagonist being creepy or dangerous in some way, it doesn’t feel like Colleen is doing much with this besides adding it in for shocks and twists which makes the romance and the intentions both feel inauthentic. It doesn’t feel like any of these people should be in a relationship with each other or anyone else. If you knew these people in real life you would hate them. I guess that’s what “dark romance” is all about but maybe you all should stop! Maybe I’m jaded by being single my whole life and not being into children (a pregnancy seems , but there’s gotta be more to these women’s lives than just trying to “make it work” with the worst men on earth (who are also very sexy obviously and have the dumbest names a person could probably think of. They’re all victims of millennial Christian naming conventions.)
The verdict: having read probably the best Colleen Hoover book in the bunch, I still think it was pretty bad. While the messaging was correct at the end, you could get the same kind of story somewhere else with better dialogue and less embarrassing names. I’m still a Colleen Hoover hater, but now I am at least a more informed Colleen Hoover hater—and that’s progress.
This Friday 3/1 the Ghost Rats has our anniversary show celebrating a whole year of Date Night with the Rats, 10:00pm at the Bughouse! We also have shows on 3/8 and 3/15, same time and place. Come on through!
Genuinely thank you for posting a full synopsis!! So many people have recommended that book to me that I was starting to think "it can't be THAT bad"