Fiction novels targeted toward a younger audience can successfully explore something as delicate to discuss as the topics highlighted in this book – domestic violence, abusive relationships and the ability to say no. Colleen Hoover ingeniously explores this topic through “It Ends With Us.”

The novel opens with the main character, Lily Bloom. Her dream is to open a floral shop, and she is on the way to achieving it. She meets the handsome and charismatic neurosurgeon, Ryle Kincaid – he is everything she could ever want in a partner, except for the fact that he doesn’t want a relationship. As she gets closer and closer to Ryle, memories of Atlas Corrigan, Lily’s first love and a tie to the troubled past she left behind, surface. When Atlas reappears unannounced, it shakes up everything Lily has built with Ryle. 

Colleen Hoover peels back the onion layers of these relationships and characters to reveal the raw core of this novel: the uncomfortable subject of domestic violence. Hoover accomplishes something most authors cannot. She makes the reader understand what most people will never experience in their lives. She reveals painful truths, and it is extraordinarily heartbreaking yet thoroughly honest. 

The brilliant thing about “It Ends With Us” is how Colleen Hoover uses the first person to write her novel. We readers see everything through Lily’s eyes. We laugh when she laughs, we cry when she cries. We fall in love when she falls in love, and we are heartbroken when she is heartbroken. This use of first-person narrative allows us to experience the color, not just the black and white, and makes the reader feel everything deeply. 

Colleen Hoover’s next installment, “It Starts With Us,” follows Atlas as he tells his side of the story and shares what comes next after the heartbreaking yet heartfelt ending of “It Ends With Us.”