Review: Colleen Hoover’s “It Ends With Us” Series

It Ends With Us and It Starts With Us are part of a series and follow the love life of Lily Bloom. It Ends With Us follows two love stories simultaneously: Lily’s troubled relationship with neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid in the present, and her teenage romance with Atlas Corrigan in the past. It Starts With Us follows how Lily deals with her life as a single mother to her and Ryle’s daughter Emerson, while also trying to navigate her reconcile with Atlas.

Colleen Hoover is an author based in Texas who primarily writes romance novels. Many of her works were self-published before she was picked up by the publishing house ‘Atria Books’ in 2012. Her stories greatly resonate with me because they are stories of the struggles of love and life.  Her most famous books, which are also my favourites, are Ugly Love (2014), It Ends With Us (2016) and It Starts With Us (2022).

I love these novels because they make me feel strong emotions. The plots of both novels are easy to follow and therefore more emotive for me. Hoover bases Lily’s experiences in her relationship with Ryle on the experiences her own mother had with her biological father, as she explains in her Note from the Author at the end of the book. It both saddened me and inspired me to learn that what Lily experiences in the novel is based on the real pain that Colleen’s mother had to experience at the hands of her husband. It feels like these novels are a tribute from Colleen to her mother.

I also enjoy how in It Ends With Us, Hoover decides to tell the two love stories in different formats. Lily’s journey with Atlas in her past is told through her journals entries addressed to the comedian and talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres, which allowed me to understand that this was in the past, but that Lily’s relationship with Atlas was an important part of her life. I will admit that I was left intrigued after each entry, eager to find out more about Lily’s interactions with Atlas, perhaps more than to read about the progression of her relationship with Ryle.

I would say that Lily’s diary entries about Atlas are the high points of the novel because Lily seems to be happy in these entries. The low points of this novel for me would be all of the times we see a side to Ryle in his treatment of Lily that makes us want to root more for Lily’s relationship with Atlas than with Ryle, despite this being the centre of It Ends With Us. 

I would have to admit that if I had to choose a favourite out of the two novels I would choose It Starts With Us. This is because it feels like the happier novel of the two of them. It makes you happy cry at certain points unlike It Ends With Us, which makes you sob in sadness for Lily and even in anger at Ryle and his behaviour. I also enjoy the character of Atlas as he is a kind man despite the difficulties of his past.

All of the characters in both of these novels are well-written which is one of the reasons why I fell in love with these stories. These are both definitely novels I can read multiple times, and I’ll always be intrigued by the plot in It Ends With Us, and absolutely in love with the love that Atlas and Lily share in It Starts With Us.